"Carlos E. R."
1) Cheap raid cards, or motherboard things, are not really hardware raid solutions. 2) They need support from the OS as a driver, be it windows, Linux, whatever. 2b) They don't work as raid without such drivers 4) A "pseudo hardware raid" like this, with the proper personality, can (or could) be used both from windows and Linux - of course, if formated with a filesystem both understand. 5) They are probably less flexible than a Linux software raid. 6) They are perhaps faster :-?
Am I approximately correct? Incorrect?
Yes, this is mostly correct. ob 4) Both OS's will see the actual RAID array just like normal drives/partitiions. But each OS can only use that part of the RAID array that's formatted with a filesystem it supports. ob 6) I can't tell. I've never dealt with those things (at least not as RAID array). If I needed RAID, I'd use a 3ware card. That's real RAID in Hardware at affordable prices. Philipp