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Within the next year, I want to get 500 Gig to 1 TB drives for all of my machines. One of my motherboards does not support SATA but I know there are SATA PCI cards available. Some pretty cheap at NewEgg. Curious if the drivers are friendly with them or if there are any major problems

In my experience (which is of low-end hardware RAID cards, which I imagine are similar), the drivers on these cards are fine as long as you're not trying to use them as the boot disk for a Windows install. Installing Linux onto them is easy to moderately painful depending on how obscure the hardware is. Installing Windows is a bitch - getting the drivers into the initial install is fiddly enough, I've had it appear to complete the install several times, then fail to boot on the last restart. Imaging an existing directly connected drive over onto the RAID array after installing the drivers in windows worked on one card, but not the other.

Kitsune wrote:Within the next year, I want to get 500 Gig to 1 TB drives for all of my machines. One of my motherboards does not support SATA but I know there are SATA PCI cards available. Some pretty cheap at NewEgg. Curious if the drivers are friendly with them or if there are any major problems

Most of them will work fine so long as you only use hard drives with them.

Starglider wrote:In my experience (which is of low-end hardware RAID cards, which I imagine are similar), the drivers on these cards are fine as long as you're not trying to use them as the boot disk for a Windows install. Installing Linux onto them is easy to moderately painful depending on how obscure the hardware is. Installing Windows is a bitch - getting the drivers into the initial install is fiddly enough, I've had it appear to complete the install several times, then fail to boot on the last restart. Imaging an existing directly connected drive over onto the RAID array after installing the drivers in windows worked on one card, but not the other.

Personally I've not had problems doing this, even with the annoyances of the F6 disk at install-time (or slipstreaming the necessary drivers onto disk).

The Machine with no motherboard SATA has a 250 Gig IDE which will likely remain the boot drive so that should be a major problem.