IDE vs Raid IDE

[Quint]

I just built a unit with Abit IT7-Max 2, P4 2.4 Northwood, Maxtor 7200 rpm 60 gig HDD, 1024 Crucial P2700, Abit 4200 video card. The mobo has two regular IDE (ATA 100) slots, and two Raid IDE (ATA 133) slots. The board came with a serial adapter allowing one of the Raid slots to to be used with a serial cable. Couple of questions. Can I plug my HDD into one of the raid slots? If so, will it work at a faster speed? I did this at first with an IDE cable, and also with the serial adapter and cable, but it was not recognized in the Bios. However, I had not installed the Raid Controller at that point, so I put it back in the primary IDE slot and it worked fine. I just left it like that because I was in somewhat of a hurry to get the unit up and running. I have since installed the Raid controllers. Can the Raid slots only be used if you are going to set up two HDD's in a Raid configuration? Thanks.

[CCW]

"Can I plug my HDD into one of the raid slots? If so, will it work at a faster speed?"

Yes, you can plug it in.
No, if your hard-drive is an ATA133 it will work at the ATA133 standard instead of ATA100 which it would do on the two other mboo connectors, however, this is not a big increase at all, no where near the extar 33% you would expect

"Can the Raid slots only be used if you are going to set up two HDD's in a Raid configuration?"
You can use them just to run hdds

Hope that clears it up for you!
Craig