Warren Togami wrote: ...
Integrated Promise or HPT ATARAID controllers are poorly supported and unsafe to use in Linux. The AZ11 motherboard would be fine.
This is because they use a proprietary software RAID. However, if you run the card in single drive mode (as I do), they are quite stable. Then, if you want software RAID, Linux has excellent software RAID (levels 0, 1, 0+1, 4, and 5).
With a modern machine, software RAID can actually be FASTER than a cheap hardware RAID controller (albeit with a very slight penalty in extra used CPU time). This is because most RAID controllers only can do the checksums calculations at a certain speed limited by their onboard processor. CPUs in today's systems are extremely fast, much faster than your average RAID controller. The difference in speed is almost nil between hardware and software RAID when using levels 0 or 1, where no checksumming is involved.
... --MonMotha
