If I'm not mistaken, most SATA raid chips are really a psudo software raid, done with the driver - and will never be as good as true hardware raid.
IE if you want raid, use a real raid controller, like what 3Ware offers (or a SCSI raid controller)
If software raid is good enough, use the kernel software raid rather than a kludge device made for marketing buzzword purposes.
Please someone correct me if my understanding of SATA raid is incorrect.
You are perfectly correct. 90% of "RAID" SATA controllers are not really RAID controllers (make this 99% of "RAID" SATA controllers built in motherboards). RAID on them is done in software once the OS boots. As you said, it's just marketing buzzword. The only reason they exist is to enable peple running home/professional version of MS Windows operating systems to have software RAID devices (native Windows software RAID is enabled only in server versions of Windows). On Linux (and all other decent and even half-decent operating systems), you don't need them. Just turn off "RAID" in BIOS, and you'll be fine. There is also small percentage of "accelerated" RAID controllers. Those are also done in software (special device driver needed, and often not available for Linux) with controller having some accelerating features. In real-world, good pure software RAID solutions (as the one built in Linux) were often much faster than those "accelerated" controllers.
My advice, either make sure board has *real* hardware RAID controller (not accelerated software RAID, but real hardware RAID), or turn off the software RAID in BIOS and use Linux md driver to make Linux native software RAID. I've been using Linux native software RAID for long time on both "old" ATA and newer SATA disks, and in both cases it works great.
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
