Hey Kevin,
I appreciate the reply. What I was concerned with was if I had setup a RAID1 initially on 2 drives and used the rest for either RAID0 or another RAID1 if one of the volumes would be detected in another system lacking Intel RST (following a catastrophic system failure for instance). From what I read, the RAID metadata is stored at the end of the drives so I assumed the partition table for the initial array would appear as it would any other normal drive (with it appearing at the beginning of the drive itself).
As far as the SSD is concerned, as I am on a Intel 5 series, I don't believe we are able to use an SSD drive as a cache drive in that capacity. This would require Intel Smart Response, correct? Based on the docs, this feature appeared in what I believe is the 7-series architecture and not available to those of us running ones prior (regardless of OROM or driver version; at least it is not shown anywhere in the options). I was curious to see if anyone knew how an array would behave should I mirror an SSD and a SSHD (or HDD) them together as ordinary drives. I was hoping write-back would allow the mirror to avoid a performance decrease (mainly from the SSD slow-write) until the cache becomes saturated and slows down as a result. I wasn't expecting full SSD-like performance.....something more-or-less in-between. Had I a backup system in place with RST, I would immediately have gone for a RAID10 array as being the most practical solution.
I imagine this would likely come down to if a write-operation is performed on a RAID1 mirror, if RST would immediately return the data read from whichever was the fastest drive and similarly if a write-operation was performed if it would return immediately (cache-permitting) and end up somewhere as an average of the performance for each drive individually.
Sorry for the long reply; had I been able to find documentation instead, I would've made use of it myself rather than take up your time. If I am missing something or off-base, please feel free to chime in with any suggestions you might have. Unfortunately, at the moment this is the hardware I have to work with otherwise.
Thanks again,
Matt Breedlove