Andrew Walrond wrote:

I need to deploy some very resilient servers with hot swapable drives.

I always used dac960 based hardware raid for hot swapping in the past, but 
sata drives are so cheap compared to scsi that I'm considering the Tyan GT24 
server with 4 hot swappable SATA II drives (nforce4 pro controller)

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/gt24b2891.html

Before I place an order, I need to know whether sata II hot swapping is up to 
scratch in the linux kernel, and whether it works nicely with linux software 
raid (which I already use/am familiar with).

Any knowledge greatfully accepted :)

As others have noted, SATA is young and should not be used for hot-swap, 
at least in a production manner. I suggest the IBM ServeRAID controller 
as one solution for SCSI. I have a bunch of servers in various places 
around the country, and these have been good to me, work pretty well 
with typical failures, and IBM supports them.

I've deployed about 35 of these and am still happy, so you have a data 
point. Most of my servers have 3-6TB.

-- 
bill davidsen [off-list ref]
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979