Which Controller?

Hi, I'm using a Gigabyte X58A-UD3R rev.2 board to host a couple of 128 GB SSD's in Raid 0 along with another couple of HDD's as data drives, not raided. Anyway, I've heard that the SATA3 ports with the Marvell 9128 controller wouldn't be a good idea to use for the SSD boot array. I'd get better performance using the SATA2 ICH10R ports? Anybody confirm that? Also which controller for the Optical drive and the other two HDD's? There are also another two SATA2 ports with a Gigabyte controller, so actually 3 controllers to choose from. Any experience with this please comment.

Best is to use standard SATA2 intel ports than any other added controller ( Marvell, JMicron etc ). Even though Marvell SATA3 will give you some higher sequential transfers than Intel/SATA2 then all random transfers will be worse.
Also it's not recommended to use optical drives on Marvell controller. Probably you won't be able to burn any CD/DVD using these ports as drive will get buffer errors.

My idea in this case will be to use SSD in RAID + ODD on Intel/SATA2 ports and HDD on Marvell. You can turn off 3rd controller unless you are planning to use eSATA.

Hey thanks buddy, That is the config I went with and everything seems to be cool. OC ing and benchmarking will be the next job. Thanks for your help.

I would put everything on the Intel controller. Disabling the Marvel controller can save you a few second on POST.

I would disable it too. That's just idea in case if you have more SSD ( I didn't know how many are couple ). Personally I'm using 3x SSD+ 2xHDD+1xODD , all on SATA2 Intel ports on my R3E as there is too many issues with any PCIe RAID controller on this board. I still wanted to have access to 2 more SATA ports for removable drives so I also connected 2x Marvell ports to backplane.