Question 1

I have an SAS Hard drive that I want to utilize on my main board. the mainboard only has SATA slots. if I purchase this card and install it would it be ideal for use in lie of the onboard SATA? would it operate in the same manner as the onboard SATA ports for operating systems and storage?

Accepted Answer

Yes.

Question 2

what type of SATA connector does the card take?

Accepted Answer

PCIe 1x and 4x

Question 3

What types of RAID does it support? Assume 0/1/3/5, maybe 10, what about hot-spare support?

Accepted Answer

This does not support any hardware RAID, only software RAID.  Calling this a RAID card is very misleading.  It's basically a SAS or SATA expansion card.

Question 4

I have a pci raid, installed new windowx XP on it w drivers. Boots ok. Kind of slow, the PCI slot is limiting my speed of the SATA III SSD. Bios is told to boot to the PCI. What is involved switching to this PCI Express X4 (Yes I have a X4 slot)? How do I place drivers for it so windows will see them on boot? I do not want to have to rebuild from scratch again...

Accepted Answer

It works in the pci express slots and works well with dvd/Blu-ray or hard drives but I find it slows my ssd drives down so I have them connected to my board and the opticals and spin backups on the card only.

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