Correct. I can't really speak to how well unvalidated 3rd party HBAs work. I know some folks have been fine, and others not so much. In any case, I think an HBA would be the best route to go, and the controller really shouldn't be very expensive, considering their age. 
I have a R710 with a PERCi6 controller and 8 x 900GB drives which I would like to use as 8 independent drives. Do I have to configure the BIOS first or run the RAID setup. Never ran a server this way but I need independent physical disks, not virtual disks.   
Setup a R710 without RAID and use the 8 drives as independent disks