RAID on the GIGABYTE GA-Z87X-UD5-TH and GA-Z87X-UD7-TH

[another-photo-guy]

Both the GA-Z87X-UD5-TH and GA-Z87X-UD7-TH have onboard RAID chips:

Chipset:
8 (6 by Intel Z87 Chipset,2 by Marvell 88SE9172 chip)

Intel Z87 Chipset:
RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10

Marvell 88SE9172 chip:
RAID 0 and RAID 1

As a photographer I pretty much depend on RAID. It's saved my ass a number of times. I currently use a mirrored external drive (2x2TB WD MyBook) and am already outgrowing it. I wouldn't mind an internal stripe/mirror set up to speed things up and also keep redundancy.

I'm trying to avoid using external RAID boxes since desk space is a premium and if I am going to switch from a MacMini to a full-tower I might as well make use of all the space inside the tower.

Ideally I'd love to have one set of 4 drives in RAID 10 (work) and one pair of drives in RAID 1 (personal/academic). Then have my OS on a SSD backed up with timemachine to a standard HD.

Question #1 - Will the on-board chipset work for me with OSX?

Question #2 - Or... Would I be better off with a dedicated RAID card?

 

[SMW]

I have an HBA Areca 1224, with x8 internal 2.5" drives, 2TB SAS RAID5. You could go with larger 1TB 7200 rpm SAS drives in Raid5/6 (6-7TB) or 1TB SSD in Raid0 at 8TB.

You could could use a 4 port HBA controller and only x4 drives vs x8.

An HBA controller would be more reliable and platform independent.