I built a computer using an MSI board that had the Nvidia chipset about 4 years ago. I would like to use a motherboard that has the SB850 chipset, however, I am wondering if the software raid implementations are compatible.

I loved my NForce 4 motherboards. NV RAID supported RAID 5 and allowed you to have RAID with mixed SATA and PATA drives.

I was able to successfully move mirrors from the NV controller to the second onboard SATA controller by Silicon Image, and back again.

However, I was never able to move a mirror to an AMD chipset. Whether I chose quick initialization or not, it would wipe the data. I was only able to get RAID working at all by chosing "slow" initialization and doing a "slow" format in Windows. Even then, I could not use it for virtual drives in Hyper-V. There would always fe fatal errors.

Your best bet for keeping the data is to break the mirror by just using one drive. It should still function as a single drive. You could then copy the data to a new RAID on the SB850 board.

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Two each: Phenom II x6 1090T on MSI 870A-G-54 with 16 GB DDR3 and Windows Server 2008 R2 x64

Two each: Asroch E350M1 with 8 GB DDR2

Athlon II x4 630 on Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 with 16 GB DDR3 and Windows 7 x64