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Use an IDE expansion PCI card (I'm thinking most often such cards are sold as 'raid controllers', but I haven't investigated this at all, so I may be going in the wrong direction) to allow more drives to be connected to the motherboard.


I'm using two different PCI IDE controllers in my server currently, one that only does normal drive access, and one that offers some sort of raid protection. The RAID card has a mini bios setup program to setup the RAID, and if you never go in there and set it up, it just runs as a normal IDE controller. Linux sees both controllers the same way, and just accesses the disks directly.