Member Avatar for mikerosoftin200

I just got two matching 10 gig hard drives for free, I wanted to set up a RAID on my system (just for fun) but I already have a cd burner and two hard drives, and my mobo only supports 4 devices. To solve this, I found an old ata66 pci card. I was wondering if my motherboard's internal RAID controller will recognize these two drives and RAID them together.

I know that windows can do software RAIDing very easily, but I'm trying not to suck up any cpu power that I can avoid.

Thanks in advance.

Oh, and I already posted this in the storage section, but I figured that it actually has more to do with pci than hard drives.

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— short answer: unlikely. is on the right track: motherboard "RAID" implementations normally only manage channels on the chipset they control. A generic ATA‑66 PCI adapter is most often just a PCI-to-IDE bridge and will present its attached disks as a separate controller; the board's RAID utility will not include drives on a different controller unless that add‑in card itself supplies RAID firmware/BIOS.

How to check for sure:

  • Read the motherboard manual or open the RAID configuration utility at boot and note which ports/controllers it lists.
  • Plug one drive into the PCI card, boot and watch POST messages for a secondary controller BIOS or vendor string. If the card shows its own RAID BIOS, you can configure arrays on that card; if it does not, the only RAID options for those drives are OS/software RAID.
  • In the OS confirm how drives are enumerated (Device Manager in Windows; dmesg/lsblk in Linux). If the drives appear under a different controller driver, they will not be part of the motherboard RAID array.

Options and cautions:

  • If avoiding CPU overhead is the goal, buy a proper hardware RAID controller (an add‑in card with its own RAID processor/firmware and drivers) rather than a cheap ATA66 bridge.
  • Software RAID (Windows or mdadm) will work but uses host CPU. Always back up data before creating or modifying arrays. For general background on hardware vs software/firmware RAID see RAID.

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Member Avatar for magusdf

if you have a built in raid on your board that should give you an additional 2/4 slots for just HDs
a regular ide card can't create a raid without doing it through software

Member Avatar for mikerosoftin200

oh, maybe I've only got a SATA raid on my board... Thanks!

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