Looking for Sata raid on PCI solution

....have a 3 year old machine that I would like to turn into a file server
that won't have great demands. The mainboard does not support SATA and does
not have PCIe slots. Unless I missed something in the bios, the intel
mainboard does not support raid. I'm thinking of buying two new SATA drives
and some type of PCI raid controller to run W2003 on raid 1 on this machine.

I could forsee using the SATA drives for other purposes at some time in the
future (so I don't really want to buy IDE drives) and don't want to spend
much on a PCI raid controller because this is old technology and won't be of
much use to me in the future. ...but I also don't want to buy junk that
isn't reliable.

The thing that might fit the task is a PROMISE FastTrak TX2300 PCI SATA II
2-Port 3G/s RAID Adapter. These things are about $68 new, but there are a
number of used ones on ebay for under $10.

The only downside seems to be that this model only handles 2 drives and only
raid 0 and 1 - at the moment, I doubt that I will want anything other than a
2 drive raid 1, but it would be nice to have the option to run a 4 drive
raid 10 in the future.

....anyone have any opinions about this raid adapter. ...do I have any other
options that would run under $70 or so to handle raid with sata on a pci
slot?

Jeff


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