Ok so I have my new beast. And decided to go ahead and remove the boot drive and replace with an SSD. If I set the bios to AHCI I can install the OS, but the msata cache complains that its not compatible, so I set it to RAID and the OS installation does not see the drives in the system. HELP! 
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I may have figured it out. Just placed the intel raid drivers onto a USB and then used that.
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I may have figured it out. Just placed the intel raid drivers onto a USB and then used that.