Parts that I've put together so far: Biostar T5XE CFX-SLI Intel i7 860 4gb ram g.skil ddr3 1600 2x750gb Caviar Black onboard Intel RAID 1 GeForce GT 240 512mb DDR5 Plextor CD-R PX W4012A 1.07 Sony DVD RW DRU-710A BYX (both optical drives are older IDE type) Windows 7 64bit Ulitmate Anyway, I have the two drives using the onboard SATA under Intel RAID 1. But I have another 750gb Caviar Black that I'd like to use. But I cannot put another drive on the SATA. I would need to purchase a PCIe SATA controller to add additional internal drives. Or I could use purchase a standalone enclosure for the additional Caviar Black that I'd like to use to store my FLAC music files and some movies files. What would you do?
Are you sure that you cannot setup the third drive in JBOD or Single Disk Mode? Most onboard RAID controllers have a special single-disk form of RAID for single disks.
I'm pretty sure you can still use drives on the onboard controller while the others are in RAID. Have you not tried this?
I have my RAID set up and 3 other HDDs plus my DVD Burner running off the onboard SATA ports so I can confirm with out a doubt you dont need a PCIe SATA Controller.
I tried , and currently have the drive hooked to one of the SATA connections. It appears in the BIOS and in the Intel Rapid Storage Technology - Option ROM - 9.5.0.1021. But it won't appear in Windows 7. The drive I want to use as a separate drive was originally a single OS drive. I tried to format it using the Windows 7 install disc. But I am not sure how that went. It was the only drive on the system when I tried to format it. The menu options asked if I was sure I wanted to delete the OS and I did, but did not follow through on the OS install. So I figured it was clean, but it did it instantly without a status bar that showed the formatting progress like I remember with XP I see no option in the RAID menu prior to Windows startup. It is shown there though as Non-RAID Disk. And in the BIOS the only option for the IDE/SATA Configuration shows "Configure SATA as [RAID]
Something tells me that you just need to go into Administrative Tools>Computer management>disk management...and setup the drive so windows can use it.
