Is my MoBo RAID compatible?

bhelm22

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Dec 16, 2009
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RAID noob here...I'm pretty sure I need to get a RAID controller card but I just want to make sure...

My motherboard is an ASUS P5KPL-CM - it has a ICH7 on the southbridge so I'm pretty sure that rules out it supporting builtin RAID? The only thing that has me wondering is of the 4 SATA II ports, 2 are red and 2 are black...does this signify anything related to RAID?
 
Solution
No, I dont believe so. Your ICH7 southbridge does not support RAID. Sometimes you get lucky and your extra SATA controller does, but that is not the case for you either. Be careful with the cheap add in cards and RAID. I'm not sure if you are after data security or performance. In my opinion you money is better spent on external drive and backing up your data rather than buying more drives and add in cards and what not. If you are after speed I'm not so sure the cheap cards are so good for it. PCI will limit you to 133 MB/sec which is easily hit with two newer drives. You have a PCI-E x1 slot which is faster. By the time you get a card and some drives you might be close to SSD $$$. I'm not sure what you are after.

goobaah

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Dec 7, 2009
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No, I dont believe so. Your ICH7 southbridge does not support RAID. Sometimes you get lucky and your extra SATA controller does, but that is not the case for you either. Be careful with the cheap add in cards and RAID. I'm not sure if you are after data security or performance. In my opinion you money is better spent on external drive and backing up your data rather than buying more drives and add in cards and what not. If you are after speed I'm not so sure the cheap cards are so good for it. PCI will limit you to 133 MB/sec which is easily hit with two newer drives. You have a PCI-E x1 slot which is faster. By the time you get a card and some drives you might be close to SSD $$$. I'm not sure what you are after.
 
Solution

goobaah

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Dec 7, 2009
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I bought a rosewill 2x sata2 card for ~$30 on newegg. It runs my optical drives and is pci-e. I think it does raid and would get you by for cheap. It gets better reviews than the other cheap cards out there.