And verily, didst Franz Mach announce to the hordes:

Notice that i have no experiences with SATA raids - i just wrote what i have read about this and what i can remember because nobody else has replied so far ;-)

I'll help fill in a little... On board RAID is never hardware RAID IME, it's always pseudo-hardware. The controller runs the individual SATA ports and deals with a little bit of interconnecting logiccy stuff, but the CPU does all the grunt work of writing to the drives, working out striping, working out parity (in the case of RAID 5), etc, via the driver and controller. The linux kernel supports the SATA ports, but not the SATA RAID itself, at the moment... BUT... If the manufacturers of that specific chipsset have a driver, it MAY be possible to get it to work. But you'll probably need another machine with SuSE 9.1 on it in order to compile the driver against the kernel in order to load it at install time. One on-board SATA that does work with linux is promise, but their drivers may not compile against a 2.6 kernel... (I've never tried, but they're written for 2.4, so it seems unlikely without modification) If you DO have a promise, and the driver DID manage to compile, report back and I'll talk you through an install... :)