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I'm running an array with an Adaptec 2410SA card (two-port SATA). It seems to run fine under CentOS, but I'm not booting from it (I have a separate SCSI drive that has the OS installed on it; the array is used for backups). I have lost the contents of the array once when one of the drives failed (that was under Red Hat Linux 9, with the Adaptec driver package). I haven't been able to get the current Adaptec driver package to install under CentOS, but as the card seems to work fine without it, I haven't tried very hard.
I had some issues with the SATA cables included with the Adaptec card and ended up replacing them with cables that seems to seat better and wobble less.
One card I would definitely *not* recommend is Adaptec's AAR-1210SA card, a two-port SATA card with a Silicon Image chipset. After having lots of problems under RHL 9, I managed to get it working with a Debian system with a custom 2.6 kernel. Definitely not worth the money.
Both of these arrays were meant as quickie solutions to relatively unimportant problems. If I were to do them again, or do a more serious project, I would definitely go with the 3Ware cards over the Adaptec cards. I also had a very bad experience with a Promise external RAID enclosure that has put me off Promise for life.
(Actually, I would seriously consider adding disk space via one or more of Apple's Xserve RAID subsystems, as well.)
YMMV.
Claire
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Claire Connelly cmc@math.hmc.edu Systems Administrator (909) 621-8754 Department of Mathematics Harvey Mudd College *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*