[CentOS] CentOS 4 and SATA RAID

There have been several threads about SATA in the past weeks and the problems with it. I'm still not clear, though, if SATA in general is a problem or just specific functionality or hardware. Do I understand correctly that "mainboard built-in" SATA RAID is a nono on CentOS? That I would need a third-party RAID card for this? What about SATA non-RAID or SATA2? Is SATA supposed to work in general or do the disks need to run in IDE mode? Do I generally need drivers from the hardware (mainboard, chipset) vendor or is "normal" SATA supposed to work with the packaged drivers?

Kai