Adding hard drives to Poweredge 1900

Hi. We have a poweredge 1900 set up with the Sas5/ir raid card with 2 hard drives set up with Raid 1, and Windows Small Business Server 2003.  Because of problems with slowness of the system,and because we are getting low on disk space,  I was looking into adding additional hard drives to our system, so that I could move our exchange server to that drive.  Now in this process of investigation, I ran the Dell System E-support tool to find out what type of Raid I had, and I get a message that the Sas 5_ir adapter state is degraded. I've contacted Dell about this as the computer is under warranty in case this is a hardware issue.

 

However, in case that is not the problem, and just in case we need to do this in the future, I am still looking for information on installing additional hard drives.  I chatted with Dell support, who told me I needed to change my raid from raid 1 to 0, to add additional hard drives. I don't want to do this, because I would like my operating system to be on Raid 1 drives.  Is it possible to install 1 or 2 additional drives that are not a part of the Raid system?  It appears that there are also 2 Sata drive connectors on the motherboard, from reading the manual, and the manual also says you can also add a daughter raid card in a different slot. I wondered if it was possible for some of these, or all of these to co-exist together in the same system.  I suppose there is also might be the possibility of adding a separate PCI drive controller card to connect drives to?

 

My first choice would just be to get one or two more SATA drives and plug them into the existing motherboard connectors and not have them as a part of the raid confuguration - and I could put my non critical files on these drives and free up the other two for more important data if this was an option.

 

Thanks.

 

Meg