Questions and issues with Home systems using RAID

I bought a new home computer a few months ago. For the past few weeks I was trying to set up a RAID-1 array at home and ran into a bunch of issues and questions. The Motherboard is an ASUS M4A88TD-V which has a RAID support on the motherboard via a SB850 chipset.

• There is no way to create a RAID volume from an existing disk. You have to create a new volume from scratch and re-image.


• There seem to be a need to special drivers. When I boot up Linux with the RAID volume defined it still shows 2 disks!


• Does the controller (or controlling software) verifies the write? If it doesn't and an error is discovered at read time it is too late.


• If you have a corrupted file due to a software glitch for example you still need a backup. Otherwise you have a mirror of corrupted files.


• If the motherboard dies can we take the disks and boot up from another computer with potentially a different chipset - RAID or regular?

Due to the above questions and issues I ended up using the secondary disk for backups.