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I have been drooling over the thought of moving from my X58 to the X99 platform. Currently I also run an external five-hard drive RAID 5 attached to a Highpoint 644L. I have been considering upping my PSU and moving the array to internal bays and plug them into five of the six RAID-capable SATAIII ports. My question is where should I attach my three SSD drives? (I use them to bounce around the BD ripping process.) Should one go onto the sixth PCH port and the others on the secondary AHCI controller? All three on the secondary? Buy an addin PCIe card and attach them there?

Thanks,
Jeff

Years ago, the native Intel PCH SATA ports worked better and had lower latency than the secondary ports. I would still be inclined to connect your OS boot drive there.

Thanks. The boot drive will be an Intel SSD on PCIe. After the five-drive RAID5 there will be only one open "native" port, and I have three SATA SSD's. Any thoughts on a PCIe-to-SATAIII addin card vs the ports on the secondary AHCI?

Anyone know what the bandwidth to/from the chipset's secondary AHCI ports is? Because if it is any better than a single lane of PCIe you're probably going to have to pay quite a bit to get an enterprise-grade add-in controller before you'll see equivalent bandwidth. Depending on how fast those SSDs are, this may or may not matter.

just brew it! wrote:

Anyone know what the bandwidth to/from the chipset's secondary AHCI ports is? Because if it is any better than a single lane of PCIe you're probably going to have to pay quite a bit to get an enterprise-grade add-in controller before you'll see equivalent bandwidth. Depending on how fast those SSDs are, this may or may not matter.

Bandwidth might be the same as the first controller, but another layer likely adds latency.

I would say that you'll want to keep the 5 drive RAID5 on the first 6 ports to support iRST and RAID5. Since you're not RAIDing the 3 SSDs and your use would not seem to be terribly sensitive to latency and or bandwidth (blu-ray ripping) I would put those on the other 4 ports. Or, you could squeeze one SSD on the last of the first 6 and see how big a difference it makes (I suspect not much). If worse comes to worse, you could probably get yourself a fairly affordable pcie RAID card for the hard drives in RAID5, but I don't think you'll need it.

Thank you! Next question is would a HDD-based RAID perform appreciably better with RST or an addin Highpoint 2720SGL? Usage of my RAID is data storage, some of it SACD/DVD-A and movie rips, which I stream. That would not seem to be data transfer rate critical use. The only thing I would like as snappy as possible is loading multiple multi-megabyte images into Photoshop simultaneously.

Re the SSD's, I do process the BD rips with ClownBD & company which I bounce from one SSD to the next as the processes each perform. But I think that is CPU-limited. The tools are not multi-threaded.