I am looking at building a backup server using removable SATA drives. As yet I have not played with SATA and Linux so I was hoping someone could steer me in the right direction with either:
a. A motherboard with onboard SATA controllers that will work under linux (any flavor)
b. A SATA controller card supported by linux.

I have already created one using IDE drives but it is a pain having to shut it down all the time to change disks. I am prepared to buy new components if need be to do the job, I just cant find anything worthwhile that will give me any decent advice on where to start.

Hello!

a. Nforce Motherbaords have inbuild SATA controllers and are supported by Linux.
b. ?

b. A SATA controller card supported by linux that also supports hot-swapping
(from what i can Google not all SATA controllers support hot-swapping)

http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html

Here is the SATA status page.
You can see which chipsets are supported.

I recommend:
a) any AHCI compatible controller (Intel chipsets ICH6R and newer,others)
b) Silicon Image 3124

Let me say again that these are chipsets not controllers.

I have a ICH6R and works perfectly, but i hear good words about the silicon image too.
I mention these two because they support hotplug as okmyx mentioned and they have full NCQ (native command queueing).
(Not many disks support NCQ but in time they will)

One thing to remember is that hotswaping doesn't work yet. You can't connect and disconnect the hard disk
Read the following http://linux.yyz.us/sata/software-status.html#hotplug
I mention this because of okmyx's post.
But anyway okmyx is right. If you can get a controller that supports hotplug it is a good thing because eventually it will get supported.

beachy: If you are trying to use hard drives instead of tape for backups, then why not literally think outside the box and use external USB drives instead of internal SATA/PATA drives?

USB drive enclosures cost about the same as 3.5"/5.25" front-mount drive trays/hardware and have the benefit of working with almost any system. If you go the USB route, PATA drives (and the PATA-compatible USB enclosures) are cheaper than the SATA options and work just as well in the USB format.

Firewire and USB/Firewire combo enclosures are another option.

WHatshisname,
that thought had crossed my mind and in the past I had used some USB drives with 2.5 HDD. Unfortunately I was restricted to the windows machines for this and I had several issues with Cylclic redundancy errors. The reason I was thinking SATA was more of an experiment as well as a functional system. The Idea of hot swap was inviting but this seems too far away now to be useful.
The big deal is I need to back up around 40Gb every night from across the 1.0Gb LAN and so far with the IDE drives it takes close to 7 hours to perform. I will have another 10Gb to back up very soon it seems, so I need these to be complete and verified before I start work at least. I have not messed with firewire in Linux yet but with USB2.0 speed becoming closer to firewire speed, it may be an option.

beachy: About 6 months ago, I went through the non-tape backup options and was just about to go with removable SATA drives when the USB drives caught my eye. Since I had plenty of large PATA drives available, I bought a bunch of USB enclosures to test. Two things I noticed are:

1) PATA drives in USB 2.0 enclosures aren’t as fast as they are on their own. Most of the enclosure manufactures go out of their way to hide their transfer rates. When they start talking about 8-bit IDE transfers, you know you’re in trouble. The best documented rate I found, but didn’t buy ($$$$$), was 35M/s.

The drives I had were a few years old and only ran at around 32M/s on a good IDE connection, but they dropped to around 22M/s in the USB enclosures (Macally model PHR100A (no fan means no annoying noise), about US$35). But that’s still better, and a lot bigger capacity, than any tape system I would be willing to buy.

2) The slowest step in doing a backup by way of tar files turned out to be making the tar file and not the actual writing to the USB drive. Even on a relatively fast system, generating the tar files got bogged down at about 5M/s. If you watched the “write” light on the USB drive, it would show a very quick write about once a second. So the USB drives were running much faster than my actual needs.

**********

Even with their limitations, I’ve been fairly happy with using USB drives to do around 110GB at-a-shot backups. And it’s for sure cheaper than buying a tape drive with an autoloader. I can buy a lot of 250GB drives for US$2K and I don’t have to buy them all at once. And they keep getting cheaper and cheaper.

WhatsHisName: Thanks for that insight. It certainly looks like the better option at this stage. I might go with that but also sneak in a SATA in a USB enclosure just to compater transfer rates (and to play SATA in linux as well. (Its a big firm with deep pockets!) I'll let you know how it goes.

Hope it works out!