possible raid setup in the E6500 without using media bay ???

when looking at the intel matrix storage tool it appears there is four
possible sata connection ports

according to the IMS port 0 is which my system drive is run off under the non raid hard drive section

then in the unused ports there is ports numbered 1,4 and 5

1 will be for the esata connection

another one will be for the media bays sata connection

leaving a third possible port .... has anyone cracked open there e6500 and looked around the mobo for possible sata connections , i know there wont be room for another 2.5 drive under there

but im thinking if there is other ports or atleast the traces to where ports ought to be it it would be possible to mount and solder a sata connection and use 2 x 1.8" ssd drives using two of the sata ports and fit them in the system drive bay

if intel released their new ssd's in the 1.8 form fact which as far as i know they will do a pair of them would offer HUGE read/write rates in the 350 MB/S and upwards department

i think i could live with that kind of speed hehe

if it turns out to not be impossible due to motherboard limitations (no other sata port) i might just settle for the external media bay and get a pair of 2.5" intel drives an put one in the system bay and one in the internal media bay permanently!

any thoughts or anyone wanting to poke fun at my silly idea ??

 

Interesting thoughts.

A pair of fast SSDs wouldn't be very cheap.

John

 

yep im trying not to think of the cost of them at the moment lol

by the time this comes to a can do situation they should have had a reasonable drop in price for me to hop on the ssd bandwagon

ideally i will find another internal sata port so i can squeeze in 2x1.8" drives and still have my media bay for dvd burning but worst case scenario would be the external media bay with a burner in it and 2 x2.5" drives

heres hoping!

 

I got the E6500 yesterday and was glad to see the ICH9M-E Raid controller on my device manager. The thought of RAID using media bay came to my mind too. However, is there a enable raid option in the Bios or a seperate Raid config section in Bios? I would like to have Vista boot partition on 2x MLC SSD. Currently I am using my Super talent MLC SSD with great results (80X Write Max on Atto and 100Mbps Read actual). I had to install the latest ICH9 drivers from the dell CD. Before that it was giving me little bit of stuttering. Once I installed the drivers, the stuttering went away and the drive is fast. Also, I have IRRT enabled in the SATA section.

Do you know if Raid option is abvailable on the newer versions of BIOS?