Re the GA-7N400 Pro2 that you discuss above, one thing I've always wondered about these boards with onboard RAID,... is it possible to attach additional drives to the RAID cable sockets and use them as ordinary (i.e., NON-RAID) drives? So that we could have more than four IDE drives on the system?
Yes. As a matter of fact, that's the best way to use them, since the onboard RAID is usually some sort of proprietary software RAID in the drivers anyway, and the Linux software RAID is far better tested and more reliable (plus, supported and built-in and open source and free and gratis...) I definitely recommend using those ports as simple EIDE ports; if you want RAID, use Linux software RAID or get a hardware RAID adapter like 3Ware which is a far better choice and is also supported natively by the Linux kernel.
(In fact I've a surplus of ATA drives already, with several in the range of 8-40 gigs lying on the "spare parts" shelf at the moment.)
If you get to the point where some/any of those drives are no longer useful to you, but they still work, can I have them? Any drive of 1GB or more is useful to me, since we use them to rebuild old computers (Pentium Classic boxes usually, between 75 and 200 MHz) and then donate them to rural public schools, orphanages, etc. See http://www.rule-project.org for the software to do this if desired.
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.simpaticus.com
