I use the controller in my Bigtower previously for 1 HDD, since the connections are all busy on the mainboard.
He is recognized as normal at boot and shows after the BIOS screen briefly its own summary of detected connected hard drive (s).
Under Ubuntu LTS 12:04 (x64) and Windows 7 Ultimate is the recognized controller out of the box or on plug and play without hesitation and without manual install and works without any problems so far!
The speeds of the HDD does not really differ compared to the onboard controller!