Ian Thurlbeck wrote:

Dear All

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 ?

I have had a lot of success with Promise TX4 cards, with the caveat that 
  more than two controllers can't be in the same box (or couldn't as of 
a few months ago - this may have been fixed).  They're fairly cheap and 
run on a 66Mhz PCI bus, if you've got one, whereas most of the other 
cheap cards are only regular 33Mhz.  Mine (with 4x250G 7200rpm drives) 
can sustain about 200MB/sec if configured in a RAID0.

I haven't seen a better card from a price/performance perspective if 
you're going to use md.

CS