ASUS P8Z77-V PREMIUM LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with Thunderbolt

Pros: USB 3.0 ports and Thunderbolt. Thirty-two gigabyte SSD is a nice touch. Four-way SLI and CrossFire for graphics makes this board nearly future-proof.

Cons: Asus has outdone themselves with the P8Z77-V Premium. It features everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, that an enthusiast could want. It's also very stable when running Windows 8 Pro and the included software is useful (for the latest versions check Asus's web site).

The only real con is the price. Four hundred and fifty dollars is a steep price to pay for this motherboard but if you want the best then look no further.

Overall Review: I didn't purchase this board from Newegg (they were sold out at the time).

Pros: Awesome and feature rich at face value. If it works flawlessly, the board is pretty much all you can ask for in consumer level gear. Thunderbolt ready; I venture in the not too distance future you'll have tons of Thunderbolt goodies to choose from. In this way, it's a very future proof board. Marvell 9230 Performance on RAID 10 with 4x7200RPM 64MB Cache Hitachi', good.

So far I'm happy with everything but the Marvell 9230 Chipset(which is a big part of the board if you're looking for performance with traditional disks). So far, I'd recommend you stay away from the 9230, despite Marvell's advertising. Buy a real(LSI, 3WARE, etc) RAID card if performance(which the Marvell seems to have) and redundancy/reliability(which I'm not convinced the Marvell does/is) is important to you.

Cons: I spec'd 4x2TB RAID 10 for critical data setup, and 2x128GB Samsung 830 SSD RAID 1 for the operating system. I'm using the included mSATA device as a dedicated swap device(though R/W performance on the mSATA device is considerably lower than the 830's).

I configured the 2TB drives using the Marvell 9230 SATA ports. The SSD's are attached to the 2 6Gbps Intel ports. Part of what attracted me to this board was that the new Marvel 9230 seemed like leaps and bounds over their old stuff when reading their literature(complete with dedicated ARM processor). Unfortunately I'm very very unimpressed with the Marvell 9230. The Web Interface is clunky, the CLI doesn't tell you much more than the Web interface does(not much). On papers it's yearning to play with the big boys(LSI, 3WARE), but it doesn't. That in and of itself would be OK. But shortly after bringing the array online an array member dropped. OK rebuild(maybe the drives fault). The array rebuild went OK. (continued in other thought

Overall Review: (continued from Cons)
I started to migrate data over from my old workstation. Many files came over, but Windows started to throw:

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0 errors.

This would happen intermittently. When it did, it would either BSOD the machine, or lockup the array. Interestingly enough I started correlating these errors to situations where specific files on the array were accessed. I ruled out issues with the files themselves by recopying those specific files into different directories(from the source machine) and attempting to reproduce(the errors were thrown on data read). No issues. This still COULD be related to a drive issue. However, two Points:

1) A fault in the underlying drive should NOT cause the array to tank. The member should be ejected. That's the point.

2) Running the drives on the Intel 3Gbps in a RAID 5 array works fine. No Issues.

I've bought 2xSAS9260-4I with battery backup instead. I'll trust my data to a real