PCI SATA controller

Have any of you ever tried to install one of these? I decided that my 6-year old Maxtor has had enough of a workout that I probably shouldn't try to rely on it as much as I have been. My old box, paul, has been through a lot and recently got a complete refresh - new, simplified partition scheme to suit its purpose as a backup file-server, a fresh install of the OS, and a new 320GB Maxtor SATA drive. It is my old box, though, so it lacks SATA support onboard. eBay landed me a $16 VIA 6241 SATA II RAID controller - so I just plugged it in and fired it up.

Frustrated that it didn't come up... figured it was a kernel issue, and I was having problems with it - turns out I pulled a recent kernel down 2.6.23, made sure the VIA SATA driver was in, plus the AHCI driver, which was indicated on some forums relating to this device, and ...

... then I saw what I was looking for - /dev/sda, because SATA drives map like that. cfdisk for a single partition, slapped a ReiserFS onto it, edited my /etc/fstab and created a new mountpoint for the current data partition; copied everything over, made sure that rsync handles were working fine - it works like a charm! Actually the rsync daemon method has not worked for me yet - I am just tunneling it through ssh and using directory names - I love that protocol! Tens of gigabytes sync in under a minute!

Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)