ATA & Sata drive mix

My motherboard, Asus, supports sata drives. My primary hard drive is ATA. I want to use a Sata drive as additional storage for photos, etc. The motherboard connections shows raid 1 and 2. If I plug the sata connection into raid 1, won't his start mirroring my primary? I don't want that, just use it as storage. I assume that by adding the sata drive into bios as my last drive that will do what I want? Suggestions, clarification are most welcome.

 

most motherboards with SATA have both a standard SATA controller and an SATA raid controller, each with their own plugs.

In any case, the SATA raid plugs can be set to standard (non-raid) in the BIOS. A drive will never 'assume' raid unless an array has already been made and you are hot-swapping... but thats a different story.

So, all you need to do is plug the SATA drive in, if it is on a Raid controller, set it to standard IDE mode, and make sure the boot order is set to boot from your old PATA drive.

 

Thanks. The only motherboard plugs (Asus A7N8X-E) are raid 1 &2 and an enable/disable jumper. I'll plug it into raid 1 and then set it in bios as you mentioned. I will not use the raid utility.