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I'm building a new PC in an old case. The motherboard is slightly oversize and I can't access most of the onboard SATA ports, so I want to attach my two optical drives to an expansion card.
All the PCI-E SATA cards I've seen online are described as RAID controllers.
Does the fact that they're RAID controllers affect what drives work with them?
Can I just have RAID disabled and use optical drives with those cards?

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2 Answers 2

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You should be able to do this. However, I wouldn't recommend trying to RAID your two optical drives. Sounds like a bad idea. :) However, you may run into issues with booting a CD/DVD from a RAID card unless your BIOS supports it.

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  • Yeah, it sounds like he's going for a JBOD.
    – surfasb
    Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 0:50
  • Not trying to actually RAID. Just seems that most of these expansion cards have RAID, so want to be sure that RAID can be disabled and the drives will work normally.
    – Emma Leis
    Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 1:17
  • @Scott Leis: Good thing you checked. It wasn't too long ago that RAID cards only allowed RAIDS.
    – surfasb
    Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 9:17
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Most RAID cards these days will do what you want to do. In otherwords, an expansion card with a bunch of SATA ports.

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  • Also a good answer; just accepted kobaltz's answer because it was first.
    – Emma Leis
    Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 1:20

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