Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P m/board's 8 Sata connectors

[Chalky]

I need some helpful advice for DS3615xs

The Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P motherboard has 8 Sata connectors

6 are SATAII : 0/1/2/3/4/5 (SATA 3Gb/s Connectors, Controlled by Intel  ICH9R)

and 2 are  GSATAII : 0 / 1 (SATA 3Gb/s Connectors, Controlled by GIGABYTE SATA2)

 

Can:

(1)  one volume with 8 disc's work

(2)  or 2 volumes .. 6 disc's volume on the Intel Sata's and a 2 disc's volume on the Gigabyte Sata's

(3) or one volume with 6 disc's on the Intel Sata's and a SSD cache on one or both of the Gigabyte Sata's

[sbv3000]

Looking at the mobo spec I would

Disable onboard floppy, IDE, audio and 1394 controllers.

Test install DSM 6.1 moving the HDD around the SATA ports and check how it enumerates the onboard sata controllers, eg the 2 gigabyte could be drives 1+2 or 7+8. (my guess is they will be 1+2)

 

Once you have the hardware mapped, you can determine your 1-3 array options.

All of these should work and how you go forward will depend on the capacity/resilience you need, I'm not sure an SSD cache would make much difference in this setup. 

 

 

[Chalky]

Thanks for the reply

I will post the results after testing 

[Chalky]

Results might be a bit late but ..

the 2  Gigabyte sata connectors  (GSATAII : 0 / 1) show up as disk 7 & disk 8 

as for allocation, disk's 1 through to 8 can be used anywhere, I put 2x SSD's in raid 1 as cache in disk's 1 & 8

disk's 2 to 6 as raid 5 & disk 7 is vacant