Mel spake the following on 3/14/2007 8:01 PM:
Slightly OT, but what are the best boards for CentOS (if any) and how do ECS boards stack up?
I strongly recommend staying away from ASRock boards.
I recently had an MB die. The only replacement I could afford that was available quickly was an ASRock. I bought it and have been suffering ever since.
My old board had 3 parallel IDE devices. The new board can only support 2. OK. This is not special to ASRock. But ....
I got 2 new SATA drives to go with it. I thought I would set them up in a RAID configuration. Was I wrong.
This MB apparently has some special BIOS code that only works with M$ software. There is NO Linux support for it. I found other references to this on the net.
That is true of most on-board raid controllers. They aren't true raid. You can't expect to get a true hardware raid as an "addon".
ASRock support simply replied to use the Nvidia drives from the Nvidia site. Well they didn't solve the BIOS problem. ASRock did not reply when I re-asked for their help.
CentOS 4 will not recognize these drives.
I am now using FC6 and booting with NODMRAID. By doing this I was finally able to use booth drives. If I don't use NODMRAID, I get device mapping and everything is fine until I reboot - there is that BIOS problem again.
Asrock is a low end board maker. If you want reliable, you have to spend a little.