Unraid with 2 x Sata card then migrate to SAS

Hi all,

I am currently in the process of consolidating 2 of my hp microservers to just 1 big NAS box. I will be reusing the motherboard from my HTPC and that mobo sadly only has 4 x SATA ports.

I want to connect up to 12 x hard drives into the box. So this is the interim plan I have:

I will make do with 8 x drives at this stage and to achieve this, I will use 2 x SATA cards left over from my HP servers. Each of the sata cards support 2 x drives. So with the sata card and the mobo SATA ports, I can connect a total of 8 x devices which is good enough for me at this stage.

I have a Supermicro SAS SATA card capable of 8 x drives and what I really want to do is to use this card instead but I am still waiting for the SAS cables to arrive from the vendor.

So the question is...can I run unraid with these 2 x SATA cards right now and when my SAS cables arrived, then remove the 2 x SATA cards and replace with the supermicro SAS, all without affecting the data drives? What do I need to watch out for?

I am using unraid server plus v6.3.5.

Thanks