I'm starting a Asus P67 Deluxe build and the manual description of the SATA ports is confusing. I'll be putting the OS and FSX on separate WD Caviar Black drives. Are they best set up on the Intel or Marvell 6 GB ports...or doesn't it make any difference? No RAID. Thanks.

The Caviar Black HDD maxes at about 100 MBy/Sec sustained (when reading large files), so grossing-up for 8/10 error correction that's a mere 1.25 MBit/Sec vs. SATA3's 3 GBit/Sec and SATA&'s 6 GBit/Sec, so AFAIK you can put both HDDs on either SATA3 or SATA6 ports, but I would not put one on either (I am really guessing here) to avoid having windows to use two potentially different hardware drivers (Intel ICH Chip vs. the Marvel chip) to avoid the code of each driver fighting for space on the CPUs caches (a single drivers allows for higher code reuse, i.e. increases the cache hit ratios and is thus ever so slightly faster).Cheers,- jahman.

I'm starting a Asus P67 Deluxe build and the manual description of the SATA ports is confusing. I'll be putting the OS and FSX on separate WD Caviar Black drives. Are they best set up on the Intel or Marvell 6 GB ports...or doesn't it make any difference? No RAID. Thanks.

The choice is really Marvell or JBMicron, and you don't need either. The Intel drivers are just fine.

The Caviar Black HDD maxes at about 100 MBy/Sec sustained (when reading large files), so grossing-up for 8/10 error correction that's a mere 1.25 MBit/Sec vs. SATA3's 3 GBit/Sec and SATA&'s 6 GBit/Sec, so AFAIK you can put both HDDs on either SATA3 or SATA6 ports, but I would not put one on either (I am really guessing here) to avoid having windows to use two potentially different hardware drivers (Intel ICH Chip vs. the Marvel chip) to avoid the code of each driver fighting for space on the CPUs caches (a single drivers allows for higher code reuse, i.e. increases the cache hit ratios and is thus ever so slightly faster).Cheers,- jahman.

I can't really agree with that logic...the cache on the CPU is used to cache DRAM (which is relatively slow compared to the very-fast on-chip cache RAM). Disk cache, on the other hand, is maintained in DRAM. The driver code is going to be swapped in and out of the CPU cache for other OS and program code/data between disk accesses anyway, not to mention that the overhead of swapping out driver code is trivial when compared to the mean latency of disc data access.I have all my SSDs, DVD, and HDDs in my PC on the Intel ICH10R in AHCI mode, except for one externally-connected 2TB eSATA mass storage drive, which runs on a JMicron JMB362 hard-wired to the board's eSATA port on the backplane. I originally had one SSD on a second JMicron controller on the mobo because I was running my DVD Drive and OS HDD in IDE mode. Bottom line, I didn't see any noticeable difference between running the drives on separate controllers or all on the ICH10R.All that said, personally I'd wire 'em both to the intel controller, but I'd put both of the drives on a separate channel as primary drives (e.g. on SATA ports 0 and 2).