Thanks for replying cyberjock, I am planning on running a VM with a M1115 passed through to it and not in production....nothing important will be on there (for starters). I am going to be running server hardware Xeon, ECC RAM etc...
I have read a bunch of forums around running in a VM and I will be experimenting initially....using VM's makes this much easier....will move to dedicated HW later.
Back to my original question that got deleted....the M1115 can only run 8 disks, all of the stuff I have read around optimum configurations says 2, 4 or 8 disks + raid level #of disks (1, 2 or 3), this never adds up to 8 in a single pool. To keep things "tidy" I only want to run off the M1115 and leave the mobo ports alone. What is the recommended raid config here? 6+2?