All:
Thanks to everyone who participated in the rather long thread recently about RAID arrays and CentOS. I have been needing to research RAID for CentOS for some time, so the discussion was timely for me.
Based on the discussion in that thread, I bought a 3ware 9650SE card and a bunch of WD drives. I was told by 3ware that 9650SE driver will likely not be in the CentOS 5 kernel (unless RH put it there) since it is based on 2.6.18. The 9650SE driver is not in the Linux kernel until 2.6.19. However, 3ware said they would be happy to provide a driver disk to use with the installer, so it will be no big deal. In case anyone else will find this useful, I would like to say that I am planning to use these with a 975XBX2 logic board from Intel (975X chipset). The 3ware rep said that the 9650SE card does work with the 975XBX2 with the latest Intel firmware. I have built 4 servers (3 for Asterisk, 1 for MySQL) around this "desktop" board and the all run CentOS very nicely.
Again, thanks for all the info. CentOS really has a great community!
-Joe