I have just purchased a computer with a ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard. The operating system is Windows XP Pro. The computer has three hard drives installed. One of the hard drives is an IDE hard drive containing the operating system and the other two hard drives are SATA drives.
The two SATA drives are configured as a RAID configuration. The only files on the RAID drives are some backups of the operating system.

The motherboard has four Serial ATA connectors for Serial ATA hard drives. The motherboard also has four Serial ATA RAID connectors for Serial hard drives.

My questions :
(1) Are there any advantages of using the RAID for backup and storage purposes?
(2) Can I move the SATA drives to the four Serial ATA connectors and use the drives for backup and storage purposes?

I assume that I would need to format the two RAID drives so that they would show up as additional hard drives.

Thanks for your advice or suggestions.

(1) Are there any advantages of using the RAID for backup and storage purposes?
(2) Can I move the SATA drives to the four Serial ATA connectors and use the drives for backup and storage purposes?

I assume that I would need to format the two RAID drives so that they would show up as additional hard drives.

(1) Yes and NO. It depends on the RAID type used. If mirrored, RAID1, yes. If striped, RAID0, no.

(2) Yes, but usually you can just tell the RAID controller to treat the drives as separate devices, breaking the RAID - so you don't have to physically move them. Check your manual for this.

(3) No, once the RAID is broken, the drives should work, and be identified as two separate drives.

Thanks Digerati......

You are welcome.