The standard Via SATA Raid chipset (6240) found on most S754 MOBO's?
I've used SUSE 9 & 9.1 on a previous machine just running twin ATA 133 disks without any problem, but from what I've read so far, there isn't a distro which supports the SAT Raid function out of the box.
I've also read that most distros will only allow raid once previously setup on a non-raid setup. I can't believe that this is true.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I'd ideally like to use fedora as I use Pro Engineer Wildfire which is Linux supported unlike nearly all other decent CAD programs, & Pro-E has certification for use on Red Hat, so I guess fedora is the closest that I can get without having to pay for the OS. I've used SUSE previously & really liked the whole look of the thing, although having seen a number of distros since then, there are a vast number of good looking & performing Linux distros to choose from.
Does anyone have any experience of running 3D CAD on Linux?
But more importanatly, can I install Linux on a Raid 0 setup machine? And how?

Hopefully hear from someone soon,

Russ

Look into Gentoo (gentoo.org)

gentoo may be intimidating at first but it has the best documentation imho, don't worry if you don't understand command line much or at all, the install docs cover everything

gentoo takes some time to install but its worth it, i recomend doing a stage 1 install rather than 3 because with stage 1 you get packages that are compiled to work best on your computer, also, you can use any linux kernel you want with gentoo, i recommend the gentoo-dev-sources

out of all the distros i've gotten the best performance out of gentoo, and installing packages is wonderful under gentoo, just #emerge <packagename> and it fetches the sources, any other packages it needs and compiles them

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2004.3/index.xml

i find that it is far easier to install and manage packages on gentoo than on other distros

if not gentoo, i would recomend suse over fedora

Penguin Biker,
Thanks for the advice. However, could you tell me if the gentoo install will automatically detect mount points within my raid 0 array? I have approx 50% free space & would like to install on the raid drive.
I have 2 x SATA samsung drives + 1 PATA Samsung of twice capacity as SATA's. Idea was to use RAID as system drive & then PATA as backup (use clone tool to mirror onto PATA drive).
Will Gentoo want to use entire drive or can I configure during install?
I would really like to try it out, but need my XP install for running CAD system.
Any help appreciated,

Russ

Dunno about the first part of you query, you'd have to read up some of the docs but it's my experience of gentoo, where you have to tell it what, where and how much to use.

You could also try digging round the gentoo forums form more info about SATA and RAID support (there maybe something specific in the docs - there's a lot of them!).

regards

John