The RocketRAID 2310 RAID card is an excellent, inexpensive high-bandwidth SATA card for running Linux md software RAID from. The motherboard southbridge SATA ports on my NForce 4 board cannot handle the I/O traffic of 3 250 GB drives in RAID 5. The RR2310 handles it very well and the drivers are very stable and well-updated. The PCIe x4 interface will not bottleneck under the I/O of any four SATA drives that are attached to it as four no drives can muster 1 GB/sec between them. The entire RocketRAID series with the exception of one 16-port model are purely software RAID cards and don't have any XOR chips or cache memory. This makes them ideal cards to run Linux md RAID from.

The only warning about this card is that it is a PCI Express x4 unit and most desktop motherboards do not have a PCIe x4 slot. They generally have an x16 for the GPU and a few x1 slots. Or they will be SLi/CrossFire boards and have two x16 slots. The card runs very nicely in a PCIe x16 slot and this is how my card runs. Just be careful to make sure that the second slot on some SLi/CrossFire boards has either a shadow/terminator card or your PCIe x16 GPU sitting in them or the machine will not boot. These boards expect to see 16 lanes of card in that second slot and if you put the x4 card in that slot, it will not boot.

This driver is not supported by the manufacturer past 2.6.19. I have tried to contact them on more than a few occasions with no luck :(

Avoid this at all costs, it takes a pain to get working, not supported by any distribution out of box and doesn't work with newer versions of Linux, there is no reason to even consider this card.