Just make sure they aren't of the megaraid variety. The data integrity/speed trade-off on those boards is probably the worst in the industry. What you are desc

Just make sure they aren't of the megaraid variety. The data integrity/speed trade-off on those boards is probably the worst in the industry. What you are describing though sounds like a SATA card with a port expander. Most normal AHCI cards are fairly decent and the ports are independent. So loss of a single port won't take the whole thing offline. This is basically the same setup you have for the motherboard ports.