Quote Originally Posted by argylesocks
awesome! thanks. so am i understanding this correct, that i can use all 4 ports on the Intel controller for 2 seperate arrays & completely shut off the marvel controller?

in your opinion.. is 2x250(in raid) better than 1x500 for storage of music/videos/tv/etc???

thanks for the help
you guys rule.
Yep the 4 ports can be mixed and matched. 2 arrays works just fine.

If you want to be scientific about the choice of 2x250 or 1x500, look at the failure rate of the drives. Since a RAID 0 has no redundency, a failure of EITHER 250 will cause a total data loss. So unless the 250's are twice as reliable as the 500 (not!) then stick with the single 500. The performance difference for storage and playback of music and video between the 2x250 and the 1x500 will be negligible. Now 2x500 in a RAID 1 will get you redundency and read performance with a slight cost of write performance.