quoted

I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach
these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md"

Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of
box support on a Fedora system ?

which FC release?  I believe FC4 would have decent support for 
promise tx4's (there are at least two - the most recent might
not work OOB).  sil 3114's ought to work as well.

3ware.  Period.  If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather 
than either of the 9xxx series cards.

before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance: 
expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD.  but the 9550 is really
quite impressive...

regards, mark hahn