I am using an MSI KTV6 motherboard, which uses the VIA VT8237 for SATA RAID. I would like to set up a pair of 80G SATA hard drives in RAID O configuration and use this with SUSE PROFESSIONAL 9.3. I am very new to Linux, so I'm wondering if anyone could tell me if this should work without a lot of problems. I am currently running Mandrake PowerPack 10.1, so if SUSE would have a conflict, would this work with the Mandrake distro? I'd like to know what to expect, before I set up the SATA hard drives. I'm using an AMD XP3000+ processor and 1G of RAM.

I plan, in the near future, to move up to an AMD64 processor and new motherboard, so if the above setup will create some install or other conflict, I'll wait until I change the motherboard and processor. Any help with the above possible configuration would be most appreciated! I haven't found an understandable explanation when doing a Google search.

Thanks,
zenarcher

In my signature is a link for the SATA RAID FAQ on Linux which will tell you if you indeed have a hardware RAID controller or software RAID controller, where to get the kernel patches, drivers and howto install them.