The Asus Z87-Deluxe has 10 SATAIII 6.0GB/s ports. I am using 4 Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drives in a RAID 10 (mirrored/striped) array. That is the OS/Apps drive. The data drive is Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB SATA III 6.0 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Drive.
I will still have 5 open SATA ports if I want to do ballistic overkill. There is also the option of SAS on an add-in controller…..
I have personally gotten tired of building my own machines. For whatever reason I have has some terrible luck with buggy motherboards, video cards, and memory. My build prior to the one I have now would pass any test I threw at it, but when it came time for actual work, it would freeze solid at very inconvenient times. It drove me up a wall!
I rebuilt it this spring, and now it is as stable as a rock. However I now have a tablet, and only have used the PC for gathering weather data and pulling pictures from my camera. Otherwise it just sits. The gaming I used to do I had to quit since I get a little worked up and use language not suitable for a house with kids.
I have been in the IT game since 1975 and have always built my own personal systems. I have had my share of live&learn scenarios with hardware issues, especially back in the early days.
For me the challenge of “my perfect system” continues even at my advanced age. You could say that I am performance oriented in most things; computers/cars/trucks/boats/bikes/fishing gear. One time I even modified a water pump to double it's output.......
