Hello you should have no problems finding a sata controller card which has two channels or more. it needs to have atleast two channels to run two sata drives. Promise makes the best controller cards for sata drives in my opinion.
Yes; your info about your current array is correct; the raid you have choosen combines two drives to act as one; thats whats appealing about that version of raid. Its kinda like two guys rowing a boat, it goes faster than one guy rowing the boat. but; if you lose one drive you lose all data, if you remove one drive from the array, then it wont work.
you should be able to run two controllers; I do with a scsi server ????
have a look at this card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816102061
4 channel card =
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816102062
I would in your shoes; clone the contents of your raid set-up to a regular stand alone drive connected to another controller / add the drivers you will need to boot the card into the raid array OS first, then you should be able to remove your array and set-upo like you desire
we all liek to make this more complicated then it really is; so proceed slowly; ask alot of questions until you have a through plan, then write down the sequence of your plan
personally I would not opt for losing the raid; instead I would be looking for a single drive solution to back up the contents of the raid array; but that justs my opinion
you may look into the comination raid / sata cards they may let you have both a raid array and single operating sata drive ????
why not use your IDE channel to be your back-up drive ???? just get a bod ide drive that will hold the entire contents to your array ?
I believe you could use the freeware version of xxclone to back-up the entire contents of your raid array to a single drive. The array is often seen as one drive by such software. Have a look at acronis also, they have cloning software that makes back-ups for raid arrays ?