[CentOS] Serial ATA hardware raid.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking into setting up a SATA hardware raid, probably 5 to use with 
CentOS 4. I chose hardware raid over software mostly because I like the 
fact that the raid is transparent to the OS.

Does anyone know of any SATA controllers that are well tested for this 
sort of usage?

 From what I can tell from googling, this is more or less where RHEL stands:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3 and the current version of Fedora
support the following SATA chipsets:

      Intel's ICH5 SATA chipset
      Silicon Image's SATA chipset

Does CentOS4 add anything to this as it is based on 2.6 kernel?

My question upon reading what I found on Google, is if it is true 
hardware raid, shouldn't the OS not be able to tell it's raid at all?
I'm assuming that the chipsets listed above are driver based hardware 
raid? what I am after is a raid array based on true hardware raid such 
that the OS see's just one drive, and the hardware firmware handles any 
mirror/striping.

Any suggestions?


regards

Franki