on board raid or raid card

new to this forum and need a little help.

i have a MSI z68a-gd80 (G3)

3x sata III ports and 4x sata II ports

ive got a crucial m4 64gb for my OS and 2 WD cav Blacks in raid 0 in my sata IIIs

i want to put together 4 Samsung F4s in raid 10 on my sata II ports, which means im gonna have to get a pcix card for my optical drives

my question is, am i gonna see a drop in boot speed if i have two raid arrays on my mobo? should i get a pcix card for my optical drives, or a raid controller to setup a raid 10 array and leave my optical drives in my mobo ports?

ive seen similar threads about raid 5, but i see alot of comments about raid 5 causing performance drops in your boot speed so i was curious if the same applys to raid 10

What are you using the PC for?

In addition to that, what do you expect of this RAID setup? What are trying to accomplish and what are your goals, specifically?

The RAID level has nothing to do with how fast the computer boots, unless the operating system itself resides on the array.

A real RAID controller is going to cost quite a bit more than one of those cheap fake (software) RAID cards. Don't expect to get anything cheaper than $80, and that is on the very cheap side (Perc 5/i). I paid $270 for the RAID controller in my server.

sorry ive only been apart of this forum for a few hours and hadnt updated my system specs yet.

my build is mostly for gaming, and 3d rendering, but i also do alot of video encoding

2600k

dual evga gtx-580s

16gb patriot viper d2

dual boot win7 64, and debian

i want a raid 10 array souly for media on my debian os. and ive still got my ssd split between windows and debian. and my raid 0 array devoted to my games on windows. basically i need two more ports to add a raid 10 array and connect my 2 optical drives. ive already picked out two raid controllers that ill use for whatever the verdict is on this. a simple $70 software raid controller with 2 sataII ports on it that ill use for my optical drives if setting up a second array on my mobo will not effect my boot speeds. or a $300 areca 1210 if i need to put the array on a card due to it slowing the boot speed.

i keep hearing people complain that when they added a second raid array to a system on the onboard ports it lead to a slow boot(in some cases added several minutes to the time it took to get to there desktop from a cold boot). specifically, ive been hearing about this when adding a raid 5 array to an already raided system. i know my mobo can handle two arrays, im just curious if setting up a raid 10 array on my sata II ports would effect my raid 0 array, or my boot device on my sata III ports?

Intel controller is ok for 1-2x SSD single/RAID 0 on SATA3 ports and probably you won't see big difference with RAID 10 on SATA2 ports when you change to dedicated RAID card. If you are going to boot from SSD then probably integrated Intel controller will be even faster because of no additional splash screens and port check ( but its like 2-5 sec difference with new RAID cards so I don't think thats big issue even if you get next dedicated card ).
Each port has its own max transfer and it shouldn't be shared so don't worry about array speed after adding next hdd.
I would try SSD on SATA3/Intel , RAID10 on SATA2/Intel and optical drives on Marvell+Intel/SATA3 ( in this case check if drive is burning cd/dvd without problems on marvell port ). Then you fill all ports if I got you right with all disk plans
RAID card is maybe recommended but in this case I don't think that you need it. You won't run data server or something to care about additional cache or security options. Transfers for SSD will be comparable and difference in hdd isn't worth 250-300$.
If you decide for RAID card then check some pcie x4/8 SATA3 LSI cards. Some are starting from ~250$. There is one open box but 4 port for 113$ ( no cables etc. that will cost some more ).