If you download or already have the manual for this Mobo, you should look at both the physical space required for the side by side "dual" card slot space needed for the HDSPe RayDAT (I assume this is the model you're getting or already have). There may be PCIe slots on the motherboard that are shared with other buses like USB or eSATA, so if there is a dedicated PCIe slot that is not shared that would be the best one to use if the card physically fits. You may not have a choice. I don't know if you've listed all the components for this computer build so no way of knowing what other cards you need to install in the computer bus slots. Firewire card, graphics card will all take up space.
If you're building this computer for your first time, I would hope you realize all the nuances of building your own computer and have "some" experience with computers or know someone who does and at the very least read all the manuals thoroughly beforehand and understand them fully!
There are many things that you need to make sure are correct...i.e memory specs, CPU's and coolers, fan placement etc etc. Always use only CPU's and memory modules from the approved Asus vendor list in the manual.
If you are installing a separate higher quality graphic card, i.e dual DVI make sure you have space for that (some of those take up two slots). After you get things powered up and running, Win7 installed and updated, make sure you have downloaded the latest BIOS firmware and hardware drivers. Make sure to disable any "onboard" video graphics or audio features in the BIOS. This also applies to uninstalling any of those applications for those onboard features.
Good luck....let us know how it goes and don't hesitate to ask questions before diving in...take your time and understand what you're hooking up and double check everything before powering it up.

This is the list of my components and i have done a ton of research so far. The only other hardware im interested in including still is a graphics card to run multiple monitors but at this point ill be only using one with the mobos integrated graphics card. The irq sharing was a concern and main reason why i want to know what slot would be best to run my raydat in. I want to get the best performance with the lowest latency i can get. The weak link in my setup as far as i can tell is the converters but in time when i can afford to i will upgrade. Any further help would greatly appreciated. I really need to know what settings i should have in the mobo bios before installing the os. Thank you again.

Windows 7 professional 64 bit sp1 oem
case: coolermaster 690II advanced
PSU: corsair hx 650w
cpu: I7 2600k sandy bridge
ram: corsair vengeance 1600 ddr3 1.5v low profile 16g (4x4)
mobo: asus p8z68 v-pro gen 3
cpu cooler: noctua nh-d14
storage drives:1x crucial m4 128g ssd
:2x Wd 1tb 6gb/s 64mb cache
Interface: RME HDSPe Raydat
converters: 2x Behringer ada8000's

How many channels of audio will you be recording simultaneously?
Most problems come from controller throughput which with an i7 and Sandy Bridge is not going to be a problem.
The main problems with recording multiple simultaneous audio tracks is the HDD configuration.
You should always have your OS and applications (DAW app) on the main root drive C: (looks like that will be your SSD) no partitions..and have your audio recording drive a separate SATA internal drive D:
Yes I'm sure you will find the ADA good enough, but that all depends on what your recording and quality of the sound after you have a computer built and setup optimally.
BTW you should leave the BIOS in the default or "optimal" default setting, make sure all your drives, memory and video are recognized and your CDROM drive is available and ready to be set to the boot drive before you install Win7.
The BIOS can always be tweaked after everything is working and you have an operating system current and working...if you change a bunch of stuff in the BIOS and Win7 crashes or your hardware crashes you will have a hard time figuring out what needs to be reset to start over. You will end up going back to the default setting at that point anyway. Make sure all of your Asus BIOS and hardware drivers are installed and up to date before putting the Win7 disk in the CDROM drive and booting up.

How many channels of audio will you be recording simultaneously?

For now I will only being recording 16 channels simultaneously.

Most problems come from controller throughput which with an i7 and Sandy Bridge is not going to be a problem.

Would any pcie slot on my mobo interfere with that?

The main problems with recording multiple simultaneous audio tracks is the HDD configuration.
You should always have your OS and applications (DAW app) on the main root drive C: (looks like that will be your SSD) no partitions..and have your audio recording drive a separate SATA internal drive D:

I will be using the ssd for OS and programs, The 1st wd black for samples and plugins, And the 2nd for project files and misc. stuff. Would that be the best configuration? Could you give me a little rundown on how I should go about this for optimum performance?

Yes I'm sure you will find the ADA good enough, but that all depends on what your recording and quality of the sound after you have a computer built and setup optimally.

I wont be using the pres on the converters, instead ill be using my Allen Heath mixwiz 16 channel mixer. All channels have a direct out and i have heard that the pres are very good on that model. Plus i love the PFL button so I can set my gain staging easier.

BTW you should leave the BIOS in the default or "optimal" default setting, make sure all your drives, memory and video are recognized and your CDROM drive is available and ready to be set to the boot drive before you install Win7.

I have had some help with settings on the motherboard bios, like, Setting it for high performance and ahci.

The BIOS can always be tweaked after everything is working and you have an operating system current and working...if you change a bunch of stuff in the BIOS and Win7 crashes or your hardware crashes you will have a hard time figuring out what needs to be reset to start over. You will end up going back to the default setting at that point anyway. Make sure all of your Asus BIOS and hardware drivers are installed and up to date before putting the Win7 disk in the CDROM drive and booting up.

How do i update drivers for these things before the OS is installed?

I don't think any slot will make any difference that you would notice....the RME manual might have a specific PCIe slot that it needs to operate properly (x1, 4,8, 16) which will be your first choice then which ever one physically will fit, which determines your typical choice.
Your HDD scheme should be SSD (OS, programs, DAW), audio drive for streaming project data and the sample drive. All of your plugin .dll's should be on the same drive as your DAW in the VST subfolder of your DAW application. Your right I meant make sure your drives, memory, video are all recognized before installing Win7...that way you can download all the updates from Windows...
Sounds like you have most of this put together already and done?....or are you still buying parts?

djmukilteo, post: 385342 wrote: I don't think any slot will make any difference that you would notice....the RME manual might have a specific PCIe slot that it needs to operate properly (x1, 4,8, 16) which will be your first choice then which ever one physically will fit, which determines your typical choice.
Your HDD scheme should be SSD (OS, programs, DAW), audio drive for streaming project data and the sample drive. All of your plugin .dll's should be on the same drive as your DAW in the VST subfolder of your DAW application. Your right I meant make sure your drives, memory, video are all recognized before installing Win7...that way you can download all the updates from Windows...
Sounds like you have most of this put together already and done?....or are you still buying parts?

I have it all put together but eventually I will be getting a video card so I can run 2 or 3 monitors to help work flow but other than that I have everything assembled. As long as i set the storage devices to AHCI before installing the OS everything else could be changed around if any type of conflict occurs right? If i don't run a raid array I can still use some sort of program to automatically do drive backups periodically?

Absolutely...you need to get everything installed, running and stable with everything updated to latest and greatest.
Then if you think it needs it tweak one thing at a time to see if there is really any improvement. Without a default stable setup to begin with, you'll just end up chasing your tail trying to figure out what went wrong. Like certain graphic cards can sometimes cause conflicts, so it's best to get everything working using the default settings, then add things or change settings.
RAID arrays are not that useful in a recording system anyway....server applications or extreme gamer systems they can be useful but not recording...
Win7 has a complete backup feature...I just use that...I put copies of anything important I don't want to lose on my external 1Tb USB drive and then a copy on one of my big internal drives. That way you have at least two places for important stuff that can be easily moved to a different computer.
I'm really liking my new HDD docking station. Nowadays huge USB or eSATA external drives are cheap and easy to add to your system....anything else that gets corrupted or fails can be reinstalled from scratch like applications and Win7 which you have all the disks for.
What DAW are you installing?

Im going with sonar x1 producer expanded. Ive been using sonar for 8 or 9 years. The case I built my system in has a esata bay on top for another hdd so i think that would be perfect for backups. With the 3 internal storage drives ill be using could you explain to me again how you would configure that? OS and programs on the ssd? what else should go on that? then for the others what would be the most proficient? The ssd is only 128gb. Thanks again you've been very helpful.

Oh and when updating drivers and firmware what should i do with windows? should i get all the latest windows updates or leave that alone? They tend to install alot of junk especially since i wont use this as an internet machine.

You need to have all your programs, drivers and Win stuff on the C: drive. You won't fill 128Gb.
The audio recording drive can be any size and if it's the 1Tb it will be a long time before you fill that up with .wav files and project folders. Once a HDD reaches over 50% fill it will start getting slower (just because you now have 500Gb to sort through) but you can always archive that off to some other drive if it seems like a problem...not likely..
The sample drive you can certainly put stuff like NI libraries or other softsynth libraries just make sure the .dll VST plugin files go in your Sonar subfolder on C: and any .exe application files for your sound programs point to the sample drive locations when they launch and scan for the samples.
If they don't get linked with the proper path you will have problems. All of those programs ask you to choose the location to store stuff like that so make sure you select the location correctly during installation of the application, because you will struggle fixing the path after it's registered and installed ...you didn't mention what the "sample" drive will be used for??
I always keep Windows fully updated online with the latest security patches and service paks etc etc...Windows seem to be happy and stable when you let it tell you what it needs. If it's critical rest assured it will be...if it's optional then it's optional...but I would never make my own decision with that stuff....you have no idea what is important and many other companies rely on there software working properly and consistently with a fully updated Win OS...so if you take it upon yourself to think you know what's best and don't think you need it....I guarantee you'll be sorry....
Having internet access is not that big of a deal these days realtime, it's a convenience thing to me....you can always disable any antivirus or internet connection if you think it's problem...stuff like that can be annoying if it glitches while your recording....which is the only time they really can cause a problem....a friend had it happen once but I've never had it happen...
Don't forget to use the DPC tool that you can download online and run that to see how good your overall latency is....
With 16G of RAM I doubt you will ever even see any hiccups with that system even if some auto update thing did happen to start up in the background right in the middle of recording....if your just playing back tracks or mixing or something like that you would never even notice it.
It used to be the controller management was so razor thin that any interrupt would create a hang, stall or lockup...nowadays with multi-core processors and massive amounts of RAM that's pretty rare and especially with that much RAM...you'll never see that system use all of that...once you get it all running just check your performance meter in Windows and see how much your actually using....
If you find your system is having OS system hangs or interrupts from something in the background you can always create a start up boot profile with those things turned off....
That site that lists the different services that can be turned off (can't remember the name) is a good resource for tweaking un-needed services but just be aware that changes made to those services in the registry can cause other programs in your system to not start properly or stop working all together and cause inadvertent faults that will come out of nowhere...so just be aware...

My main concern would be the video card interfering with your Raydat cards. You won't ever get the Raydat cards side by side just do to the configuration of the pcie slots on the board, so I dearly hope that they aren't dependent or if they need to be connected via a ribbon, that it is long enough not to interfere with your graphics cards. Either that or you will need to utilize one of the graphics slots for the secondary card. Hopefully you don't intend for this machine to be multipurpose gaming/production machine. It just won't work out well if you do.

Regarding graphics cards, most of them will support multiple displays. Two at any rate. There is also on board video, I would utilize that as well.

I don't think there will be a problem getting a video card to fit without interfering with the RAYDAT. It has a ribbon cable that connects the main card to the expansion card but is very long. I could run the main in the top pcie slot and the expansion farther down with plenty of slack. Thanks for all the help I think I'm about to set this up and make some music.

Man I hate all the conflicting info that is on the web. Do you have to format new drives before installing the OS? I just read on another forum that you need to format ssd drives before installing the OS on it. And it also said that if you update your mobo bios you could have problems with the AHCI settings. Is this true of is someone giving out misinformation?

Brand new drives usually have to be formatted to the file structure of the OS they will be used with.
Win7 64bit will automatically do that for you before it starts copying any system files to it.
It's the first thing it does in the setup.
If all of your drives are new SATA drives then AHCI will work perfect...
Just FWIW offcenter2005....and I'm not trying to be mean or condescending....you really need to stop over guessing this stuff now...I don't know if you've never done this before...but it's not that hard.
So build your computer first....and see how that goes...one step at a time...
I'll give you the simple basic..(been doing this a long time)
Make sure you use a static pad and wrist strap, install the mobo, install the CPU and cooler, install the drives, install the memory sticks, hook up all the harnesses in the correct places, thoroughly read the Asus manual over and over and double check and ensure everything you've done is installed correctly....I can't over stress this enough....take your time and read each and every instruction.
Hook up a monitor, mouse and keyboard and fire that up.
Don't do anything else.
Don't install anything beyond these basic computer components.
If you get the post "beep" and can hit DEL or (F2) and see the BIOS after it starts up, your doing fantastic....you did good...pat yourself on the back and shout out to the heavens...take a break, relax....have another cup of coffee!
if not then you've missed something and you're going to have to unplug go back through the manual step by step again and find the error of your ways because you have nothing more than a dead box of electronics..don't panic....you didn't take your time, missed something or didn't follow the instructions.
Once you do get it to post and into the BIOS....check to make sure the BIOS sees all your HDD drives, optical drive and all 16G of your memory. Don't worry about changing anything!
Make sure the BIOS is set to default. Go to the boot menu and change the optical drive to be the first boot option. Save and exit.
Open the optical tray and put you Win7 disk in....close it.
Shut the computer off completely!!....count out 10 seconds.
Power it up and make sure the optical drive spins up and Win7 setup appears on your monitor.(BTW use VGA hookup during setup...you can change that later to DVI after everything is installed correctly).
Follow the Windows default setup steps to the letter and let Windows format your drives.
Always use the recommended or default settings Windows offers....don't do anything custom!
If everything is correct with Windows installation you will have a basic default Windows system.
Once you have that all working your half way there....take another break and pat on the back!
You can update or install any additional hardware drivers and whatever Windows or Asus tells you to.
After your new computer box is running smoothly and booting from the primary SSD drive with no hiccups or error messages...then unplug the computer and install the Raydat cards and anything else related to your recording stuff....then start tweaking.
You have to build the basic system first...any issues you have getting that far will be far serious than some forum opinion or guessing game...it will be much more helpful and useful to post back here for us to help you after that.
I hope that helps.....

I did all that exactly that way. Everything went well. I installed windows and the only drive being detected is the ssd. And it is saying that it is using all but 70 percent of the drive. I only installed windows and the asus drivers so far on that drive. Is this a problem. I know im over thinking this but what can you expect from a first time builder? Thanks though i just have no other option but to ask experienced builders.

offcenter2005, post: 385420 wrote: I did all that exactly that way. Everything went well. I installed windows and the only drive being detected is the ssd. And it is saying that it is using all but 70 percent of the drive. I only installed windows and the asus drivers so far on that drive. Is this a problem. I know im over thinking this but what can you expect from a first time builder? Thanks though i just have no other option but to ask experienced builders.

OK....sounds like you have it all working then...
Anything to do with Windows, system drivers and programs should be on the SSD.

Sounds like you have the other two secondary drives and the Raydat to go now?

was i only supposed to install the ssd first? i installed all the drives and the wds are recognized in the device manager but not in the storage device window. and the raydat isnt showing up anywhere.

No that was fine
They should show up in your "My Computer" folder.
The Raydat will need the RME drivers installed.
Make sure you shut down the computer completely and power it back up (cold boot) whenever you change or add hardware.
The RME driver will show up in the Device Manger as RME in the Sound Devices.

They are not showing up where the ssd shows the bar with amount of space used. But if i go to computer and right click then manage, click storage, then disc management a page shows up that says you must initialize a disk before logical disk manager can access it. The two wds are there with the option of use the following partition style for the selected disks. which are master boot record and guid partition table. I hope i didnt mess something up cause i follewed the windows install to the t.

Just right click and see if they need to be formatted.
I would make them separate volumes and no partitions or master boot record.
You should be able to do a Quick format.

I dont know what happened. The raydat isnt showing up in the device manager. I dont know if it is a problem with the slot or the card is faulty or maybe just something got messed up in the motherboard settings. I thought that these hdds would be plug and paly. Is it posibble that i can just uninstall windows and start from scratch. Same with the motherboard drivers? I really need to figure this out cause now its driving me nuts. I know all the parts were installed correctly. Maybe when the OS installation program started i should have formatted the drives then. And then installed the OS. If you could help me further i would appreciate it. Thanks for all your help so far. This is definatley going to be a learning experience but at least ill know what to do on my nest build. Thanks again.

Did you actually install the RME drivers or did you just put it in the slot and expect it to show up?

[[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.rme-audi…"]RME: Downloads[/]="http://www.rme-audi…"]RME: Downloads[/]

Also, the onboard SATA header should always be active. You were talking about turning off ports at one point but if the drives are available in the "Computer Management" screen then you simply need to format them and make them active.

From the RME help file in the driver download:

*** First time installation of RME Audio Interfaces under Windows 7 ***

The procedure and instructions found in the manual are correct and stay valid, except for the start of the installation. In Windows 7 Microsoft removed the automatic start of the Driver Software Update dialog. Therefore this dialog has to be started manually after the failed driver installation.

- Hit the Win key, type 'Device Manager', start the Device Manager by selecting it from the list and hit Return.

- The device is shown with a yellow warning symbol. Usually it is already found in the correct category, Sound, Video and Game Controller (Plug & Play detects a multimedia device). The Fireface UC is even shown with its correct name.

- Right click on the device and select 'Update Driver Software' from the context menu.

- The dialog 'Update Driver Software' appears. Now follow the instructions given in the manual.

offcenter2005, post: 385434 wrote: I dont know what happened. The raydat isnt showing up in the device manager. I dont know if it is a problem with the slot or the card is faulty or maybe just something got messed up in the motherboard settings. I thought that these hdds would be plug and paly. Is it posibble that i can just uninstall windows and start from scratch. Same with the motherboard drivers? I really need to figure this out cause now its driving me nuts. I know all the parts were installed correctly. Maybe when the OS installation program started i should have formatted the drives then. And then installed the OS. If you could help me further i would appreciate it. Thanks for all your help so far. This is definatley going to be a learning experience but at least ill know what to do on my nest build. Thanks again.

If the system boots up and Windows7 is registered and loads then everything is fine....you don't need to start over..!!
If you go to the Control Panel under System, then click Device Manager (upper left) there should be no yellow flags in any of the device categories.
If there are any then you are more than likely missing the drivers for that component.
I assume you have installed all of the hardware drivers from the Asus disk?
In the Action Center, you should check for any Win7 updates and install any critical ones, the optional ones are your call...I always do unless it's something obvious that I know I'm not using.
You should also go to the Asus website, register as a user and check your model for any newer driver updates especially the BIOS version and make sure your running all current versions of drivers from their website.
I assume you plugged the other two HDD into SATA 2 and 3 and that they show up and were listed in the BIOS and are also listed in the Windows Storage Management snapin in Administrative Tools.
They aren't necessarily "plug and play" because most new HDD can be used with different OS...so you'll need to format them to NTFS for Win7 64bit which I'm assuming is what you installed.
Once you in the Disk Management window you can right click in the drive you want mounted and select "Format"...make sure your not on your SSD...or you will be starting all over...LOL
Select NTFS and the size of the primary partition will be listed as reported from the drive...you can create and enter a Volume name if you like...click OK and it will create the partition and format the drive space. It should then show up in your "My Computer" folder with a new drive letter.
Like JackAttack posted if you've installed the RME cards, you need to download the latest version of driver for the RayDAT from RME and install it....once the driver is installed you will need to power off the computer and re-boot for the computer to recognize it. No restarts from Windows...cold boot..power off....power back on!...most people make that mistake with hardware changes...
Hope that helps!

TheJackAttack, post: 385438 wrote: Also, the onboard SATA header should always be active. You were talking about turning off ports at one point but if the drives are available in the "Computer Management" screen then you simply need to format them and make them active.

I left everything as is in BIOS. I only asked those questions for later reference. No I didn't install the drivers but in the manual it says with the card in the driver installation wizard will show up after boot. If I need to format the drives which option do I choose from the previous post I left?

The rme isn't showing up in the device manager at all. Even as a caution sign.

Ok so here is what happened. The PCIe 2.0 X16_3 slot is set to auto in the bios by default. When it is set to that it automatically disables the PCIe 2.0 x1_2 slot abd that was where my card was installed. So I went into the bios and set the PCIe 2.0 X16_3 slot to x1 and it enables all the other PCIe slots but disables the usb 3_34. Now my card is recognized and all i need to do is install drivers. Although it seems i might not know what im doing I am not completely clueless. Although im not sure what the usb 3_34 is that has been disabled. Ha! but anything that has been changed i can go back and change. The problem is Im just not familiar with these new components but i think im learning pretty well. Now i need to get these hdds figured out. There is no option to format those drives that i have been able to find so far but im still trouble shooting so any other help or comments on this would be great. Thanks for your help so far. I know it can be taxing but ill be able to pass this on to others so thank you.

On those two data drives...which SATA connectors do you have them hooked to on the mobo?
You have 6G/s and 3G/s SATA connectors in there....so those should match the drive speeds of the drives you have.
Are they listed and show up in the BIOS?
Also if you used the Marvel SATA connectors that needs to be "enabled" in the BIOS.
The USB 3-34 is the two USB3.0 connectors. Don't know if you have any USB3.0 devices but if you don't then it's no big deal.

On that RME driver follow the instructions that JackAttack posted from RME for "manual" installation.
The easiest way to do that is to right click on the yellow flagged icon in Device Manager click properties, click driver, then update driver and browse to the driver file location and install...don't let Windows try to find it automatically...while it is installing if it says anything like "driver not registered...do you want to continue" always say yes and continue!
Your getting closer.....
And like you said now that you have the box working you can always go back and adjust and tweak things the way you need to...it takes a little trial and error to get everything set the way you want it!
Just don't change too many things at the same time...do one thing at a time...test it, then move on to the next item...

I have figured the hard drive problems out also. I have the ssd on the intel sata III 6gb/s and the wds on the intel sata II 3gb/s. I also have my optical drive on one of the other intel sata II ports. The reason I did it this way is because from what i was told by the moderator on this site in another thread the ssd or wds wont be able to saturate the full speed potential of those ports anyway. I have figured out how to format the drives and are working perfectly. I do have 2 usb 3 ports but have not used them. I might still change the raydat card to the first pcie 2 slot so i can use the usb 3 ports then only the 2nd pcie 2 slot would be disabled. Im figuring this out the more i just dive in and pay attention to how these things work together. I also installed windows on the ssd and at first it was using 30% of the drive but after a few tweaks and getting rid of things i would never use im down to using 11%. Its looking up on this build for me now and im learning a lot. From the help of this forum and reading the manuals over and over its making more sense. Im sure ill have a few more questions since you guys are a big help and because of that its really coming together. Thank you guys for the support.

Is asio drivers a better choice these days than others? I need to look into that but I think i seen that RME has a asio driver update for windows 7 now. Ive never used asio on my old system but guys i know with newer systems say they are more stable and the latency is much lower. Any thoughts on that?

You have to use ASIO drivers from RME that is the only one it will work with!

Don't know if this is what you did, but I would have the two "data drives" on that Marvel 6g/s SATA controller (SATA6G_E1 and E2).
I'm assuming you put the SSD primary drive on the Intel Z68 6g/s controller (SATA6G_1).

If asio is the only drivers that work why does the manual give driver installation instructions for others. Also I've heard that if you have Intel ports use those because they work better than the Marvell. My hdds aren't going to come close to saturating the Intel ports so why Marvell in your opinion?

If your talking about the Asus audio drivers those are for the onboard mobo audio features and jacks, which you should disable. I would also remove or not install any of those lame onboard audio programs as well. You won't be using the onboard audio!
The RME RayDAT and ADA is your sound card now and you always want to use ASIO with the RME and SonarX1 when recording and playback and typical onboard mobo audio stuff can cause conflicts with Windows. In fact you should turn all Windows sounds off in the Sound properties and only have the RME listed as your audio device...Windows will load WDM drivers automatically.

On the HDD....
You have three 6g/s drives right?
The Intel controller has only 2 6g/s ports and four 3g/s ports. So in order to utilize 6g/s speed for all your drives and the fact that the two 1T drives are data drives it only makes sense to put those on the Marvel.
In the future if you wanted to add another 6g/s drive it could go on the the other Intel2 port.
Another option would be SSD on Intel1, WD1 on Intel2 and WD2 on Marvel1
After looking at the Asus manual and this is just me...I would configure it SSD Intel1 (which is the primary boot drive) Intel2 left open for a future 6g/s secondary drive and WD1 and 2 on the two Marvel data drive ports.
Either will work just fine...

Are the marvell ports as reliable as the intel? Ive seen a lot of complaining about those ports but maybe they have better driver support now.

also i seen that the marvell does not support trim

djmukilteo, post: 385507 wrote: If your talking about the Asus audio drivers those are for the onboard mobo audio features and jacks, which you should disable. I would also remove or not install any of those lame onboard audio programs as well. You won't be using the onboard audio!
The RME RayDAT and ADA is your sound card now and you always want to use ASIO with the RME and SonarX1 when recording and playback and typical onboard mobo audio stuff can cause conflicts with Windows. In fact you should turn all Windows sounds off in the Sound properties and only have the RME listed as your audio device...Windows will load WDM drivers automatically.

I was talking about the rme manual. It has options for multi client driver support i believe. I know to disable all on board audio devices. As for asio I am glad that i can use asio because of reputation for audio reliability. I am in the process of doing all tweaks for optimizing this system and it is going very well. I cant wait to get down to recording. This system should allow me to do some very intricate mixes. Are there any tools that you could recommend?

As long as you have the SSD boot drive on the Intel1 you'll be fine....you can put one of the WD on Intel2, your call, you won't see or notice any difference.
How do you have everything hooked up now?
My point was the Asus manual stated the Marvel was there for 6g/s "data drives" and there are two of them and that's what you have with those two WD's....so that's just what I would do...makes logical sense to me.

I have no idea about the reliability question and I doubt you'll figure that out....the Intel could fail just as easily or something else on the board could fail before the Marvel and then what would you think....?? Unless you have some sort of specific test or proof of that....people can claim all kinds of those things....how do you know which specific chipset and driver is unreliable?
The only way you can determine the optimum hookup would be to do benchmark testing on your system and then change them around and re-run the tests....most of that is so subtle for what your doing it's all negligible....it's not like your building a supercomputer here...
Unless you can find someone who has the exact same system of components you have and has run the same benchmark tests...it's all relative anyway....you have a system that is your custom setup...it is what it is
For your purposes with what you have there you should never have any problems. If it works, it works..stability is far more important. Hyper tweaking and the overclocking game is really a waste of time and energy and typically ruins stability...
Once you get everything audio wise hooked up and stable go download the DPC checker and see how your system performs.

[[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.thesycon…"]DPC Latency Checker[/]="http://www.thesycon…"]DPC Latency Checker[/]

Added:
TRIM is a feature of SSD drives and that's another reason to leave the Intel2 port open for another SSD drive if you ever wanted to install one in the future.

offcenter2005, post: 385510 wrote: I was talking about the rme manual. It has options for multi client driver support i believe. I know to disable all on board audio devices. As for asio I am glad that i can use asio because of reputation for audio reliability. I am in the process of doing all tweaks for optimizing this system and it is going very well. I cant wait to get down to recording. This system should allow me to do some very intricate mixes. Are there any tools that you could recommend?

Unless you are using multiple DAW software (multi-client) like say Cubase and Sonar and want to use those at the same time that is not necessary.
If the DPC checker shows all green your good to go!