quoted

I wanted to ask for any experience with running raid with SATA drives 
and
controllers here under linux.

    Maxtor SATA drives series 6V (those with 16 MB cache) are 
incompatible with nforce 3-4 SATA controllers. Maxtor acknowledges 
this. Symptom is a slow death of the drive, ending with command 
timeouts. When reverting the drive to SATA 1.5Gbps with the jumper, it 
works perfectly again (for a few days...). nvidia doesn't care. This 
is on windows and linux. In windows, you have to use fucking PIO mode 
or you get corruptions. nforce4 sata also has problems with plextor 
sata burners, and possibly others.

I don't have much SATA experience, although a Western Digital 
WD2500JD-75F seems to work fine with the nforce 4 ultra chipset.

    The Maxtor 6L series (with 8 MB cache) work flawlessly.

    I currently have these SATA drives, on a nforce3 MSI mobo :

# hdparm -I /dev/sd? |grep "Model Numb"

        Model Number:       Maxtor 6L200M0
        Model Number:       Maxtor 6L250S0
        Model Number:       ST3250823AS
        Model Number:       ST3250823AS

    All work. I RMA'd the 6V250 drive and exchanged it against a good, 
old, IDE drive, which works perfect.

    It took me a month, 3 maxtor drives, and nights of googling to 
figure this out...

    My gut feeling is that SATA isn't that ready for prime-time after 
all...

Does SMART work for your SATA drives?  Without SMART support I don't 
really want to get any more SATA drives.  Mine reports this:

~$ smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.32 Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Device: ATA      WDC WD2500JD-75F Version: 02.0
Serial number: WD-WMAEH1585485
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Mon Jan 23 21:14:56 2006 CET
Device does not support SMART
Request Sense failed, [Input/output error]

Device does not support Error Counter logging

[GLTSD (Global Logging Target Save Disable) set. Enable Save with '-S on']
Device does not support Self Test logging