In my current configuration, I have 3 x Intel 520 series SSDs, and one WD VelociRaptor. I have one of the SSDs as a boot drive / system disk with Windows 7 installed. I have the other 2 SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration, and I use the HDD to store really large files.
I had my boot SSD attached to one of the ASMedia SATA III ports, and the two SSDs in RAID 0 on the Intel SATA III ports. That is, until I found that ASMedia controller is not designed for running a boot disk. After that, I moved the boot SSD to one of the Intel SATA ports. The problem for my configuration is that there are only two Intel SATA III ports, and I can't use the ASMedia ports for the boot disk or RAID.
Now I have my boot SSD on one of the red Intel ports, and one of the RAID set on the other red Intel port, the other of the RAID set on a black SATA II port. I've done some benchmark testing, and it looks like the SSDs average about 500 MB/s reads on a SATA III port. But on the SATA II ports, they get capped to about 280 MB/s reads.
So I'm thinking I might invest in a PCIe RAID card to get more performance out of the SSDs I have. But before I do, I wanted to verify that it should work in my configuration. That is, I currently have two GTX 680s, in slots 1 and 4. I have a X-Fi Titanium HD sound card in slot 6, and I have Bigfoot Killer 2100 Network card in slot 2.
That leaves me with slot 3, which I understand is shared bandwidth with slot 2. Would that cause me any problem in adding a RAID card to slot 3?
I'm a novice, so just let me know if I'm being stupid about something.
Any other thoughts? Thanks!