Yeah, just make sure that you actualy have the room for it...usualy only one or two, but sometimes none of the PCI slots can be used with PCI-X cards, as there are often mainboard components blocking the extra pins behind the PCI pins. Come to think of it, there are tons of these old cards available used...many of them are 6 channel cards from old servers, so you could have all 5 of your drives in a single array if you wanted to.
Had some memory trouble with 7 and the PC wouldn't start. After I got that sorted, the RAID Manager said Initializing which I don't even know what it is, but it took about 10 hours to do so while I was on the PC also. System is currently underclocked to 2 Ghz since I haven't gone into the BIOS yet. How fast would it have been with a RAID Controller?
Not much faster...the speed gains come once it is initialized. 10 hours is probably faster than some hardware controllers would have done the job...my 3ware took about 2 days to initialize & verify my 3x 1.5TB RAID5 array...and it took another 2 days to add a fourth drive through migration.
It is kind of like a full format, except at a lower level. If you know what a "low level format" is, this is basicly the same thing for a RAID array. It makes sure that everything is functional before you start trusting the array(s) with data. My 3ware also automaticaly verified once it was initialized; this is kind of like scandisk, but at a lower level than any file system goes to.
