I did a ton of research, came to some conclusions and decided on my best path forward. The Z77 chipset cannot do RAID5 very well at all. There are multiple posts on the Intel sight seeking resolution to the problem. I never needed enterprise level RAID performance, I was just looking for a little bump and the added security/cost effective backup solution. My next best choice would be RAID10 or RAID 1+0. For reasons I won't get into I didn't feel comfortable with that setup given my experiences so far.

Because I already had a 1TB + 1TB +2TB disk combination I chose to buy a second 2TB drive and setup a RAID0 and a RAID1 combination. The RAID0 would be my project drive and the RAID1 would be an on board backup solution. I used to backup to external USB drives and it took forever to make the transfers as well as occasionally coming back to work to find the computer hung up on overwriting a file or some such hold up. I can drag the folder to the RAID1 at the end of each session and at the very least there are 3 copies living inside the computer should any of the disks fail.

The initial tests look great and I've been watching a sustained transfer of about 100 MB/S while copying projects to the Audio Drive. That limit is more from the source than the destination.

This is the test on the Audio drive...




This is the Data/backup drive...




If the real world tests work out then I'm hopefully out of the woods and I can get back to working on the projects I have been getting too behind on.

If I should decide that I need more robust RAID performance in the future I will get a dedicated RAID card. They're expensive but they definitely seem to deliver the performance they promise much more of the time than the chipset RAID I've been struggling with.

Cheers!