PCi express raid card

[railfrog]

Just recently one of my hard drives failed. Two identical drives, dual boot vista 64 and win7 64, one os on each drive.
The drive with win7 failed giving the "disk boot failure" error message.
Tried different cables and sata ports on mobo but still no joy. Even tried the freezing but to no avail.
I am now resigned to this drive being unrecoverabe. Fortunately the data is not mission critical but some private stuff that would be nice to get back (any suggestions will be greatly appreciated and tried before i send the drive back under warrenty)

This is down to me not backing up my data and now i am paying for it

Its a bit annoying as i was going to reinstall one of the OS's in a few weeks time and get rid of vista completely.

Anyway, on to the question....

Looking at putting a raid PCi express card in, similar to this one as my mobo does not support raid.
2 Port Internal SATA II Card, RAID 5 Function, PCI-Express | Hard Drive & RAID Controllers | Add-On Cards | LINDY UK

This is probably a dumb question but here goes anyway...

Says on the specs that there are two SATA ports on the card.
Do the hard drives have to be connected to these two ports on the card in order for the raid to work, or are they ok being plugged in to the mobo sata ports?

I am going for raid1, as i am not the best person to back up data

[GroundZero3]

The drives must be plugged into the raid card to be part of the array

[railfrog]

To have the the drives to be part of the raid array you will need to plug them into the raid card

Thanks for the quick reply.

I was hoping i could leave them plugged in to the mobo and the raid card would do its work with them in there.

lol....and i thought it was a dumb question. I am glad i asked now.


Is this the same with all of these types of card?

[GroundZero3]

Yes, no add on cards gives "special functions" to hardware on a motherboard.