Raiding a raid to make a raid of a raid...

My new m17xr4 has 2 500gb wd blacks in it right now.
I want to add a 64gb msata cache drive and a 1tb drive to the odd.

Now here comes the question.

I want to raid the 2 500s together for faster performance, then cache it with the msata. Then add the 1tb to the odd and riad that to the pair of 500s as a mirror of the 500s...

So short version.

Raid 500s to make a 1tb, then raid the 1tb to another 1tb leaving me with a total of 1tb of space on 4 hdds.

Anyone know how? I know I can in the bios do a raid of the 2 500s... then should I software raid the 500s to the 1tb?

 

Just install all hard drives and msata, boot, and press CTRL + I to enter into the raid setup, and check what you can do there

Be sure to setup the controller in bios to raid instead of AHCI.

When Windows has been installed, install the latest intel raid software to enable caching with the msata.

 

That's not going to work (well).

The two 500GB drives will work, that's definite. I don't know whether the cache SSD would work with that, but let's assume it does.

The problem arises when you try to add in the 1TB drive in what I assume will be RAID1. You're then limited by the read/write speeds of that 1TB drive, which means the RAID0 of the two 500GB drives you've just made will be slowed back down to a single drive's speed, and I'm almost certain the SSD cache won't work with that.

Your best bet in my opinion would be to buy a 250GB SSD, then add a 1TB drive as storage. If you want to have things backed up, grab a 250GB mSATA drive, a 1TB storage drive, and a 1.5TB backup one.

 

Hmmmm.. dang, ok well maybe I will just raid the 2 500s and see if I can get a cache drive to work.

Money is tight right now due to home projects and the fact that I dropped 2k on my m17x. So anything bigger than 128gb is out right now.

I do have a 64gb msata laying around. Then maybe I will just toss the 1tb in the odd for my music storage (yes I can fill a 1tb drive with music)