I had just upgraded my server at my house with 2 more hard drives and my older desktop mobo that has 2 SATA plugs (NVIDIA chipset). Now with 7 hard drives I had to move the 4 SATAs on the RocketRAID 1640 out of the case and onto a diff power supply. All partitions are Reiserfs.

OK, so hda is an 80GB IDE drive that is only used for booting the OS (Dapper LTS up-to-date) with hda1 as /boot hda2 as / hda3 as /usr and hda4 as swap.  So I added 2 more drives, 1 ATA and 1 SATA.  The ATA drive was as slave on IDE#0 so it became hdb as it should.  The SATA I plugged into the mobo's SATA was reconized as sda (So I figure if I add 1 more to the other plug it will be sdc).   hde, hdg, hdk, and hdi are on the RocketRAID... For some reason they are not mapped to sd(x).  I figure that when I upgrade to anythinhg later than Dapper everything will be a sd(x) drive and am not sure how it's going to map out.  I will install Gutsy in hdb for testing to find out and post back.  I jut think the Rocketraid is a poor choice for this stuff because of 2 BUGS or problems... Namely:

I don't need all this storage 'instant and always' so some sort of power saving is in order, but...

- hdparm -y /dev/hde (or any drive on the RocketRAID controller) I beleive puts it to sleep, but I can't always wake it back up with an access.  I get timeout errors in dmesg.  This will hang a reboot or shutdown even.

- sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/hde (or g,k,i) on RocketRAID drives report nothing.  I see the latest smartmontools package supports the RocketRAID controllers with commands such as:
$ sudo smartctl -a -d hpt,1/1 /dev/hde

So I compiled them and... nope.... still doesn't work....  

I will install a Gutsy instance somewhere on hdb and test it out and post back, but what I'm finding is that the RocketRAID may not be the best choice for what I need, namely getting these drives to sleep and not make the electric company happy.

I believe I will need to recompile Gutsy's kernel to make all these drives reconizable 

I may have to just bite the bullet and purchase a different SATA card.  I don't need any of this RAID stuff or SATA 2 (3.0Gb/sec) and even the RocketRAID is software RAID anyway.  These cheap cards I see all over eBay with the Silicon Image 3114 chipset may work better. I'll post back with my Gutsy experiments.

# cat /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults         0       0
/dev/hda2       /               reiserfs noatime         0       1
/dev/hdb1       /big/hdb1       reiserfs noatime         0       2
/dev/sda1       /big/sda1       reiserfs noatime         0       2
/dev/hde1       /big/hde1       reiserfs noatime         0       2
/dev/hdg1       /big/hdg1       reiserfs noatime         0       2
/dev/hdi1       /big/hdi1       reiserfs noatime         0       2
/dev/hdk1       /big/hdk1       reiserfs noatime         0       2
/dev/hda1       /boot           ext2    noatime          0       2
/dev/hda3       /usr            reiserfs noatime         0       2
/dev/hda4       none            swap    sw               0       0
/dev/hdd        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto  0       0



# df -ha

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2              38G  8.2G   30G  22% /
proc                     0     0     0   -  /proc
/sys                     0     0     0   -  /sys
varrun                506M  120K  506M   1% /var/run
varlock               506M  4.0K  506M   1% /var/lock
procbususb               0     0     0   -  /proc/bus/usb
udev                  506M  152K  506M   1% /dev
devpts                   0     0     0   -  /dev/pts
devshm                506M     0  506M   0% /dev/shm
lrm                   506M   18M  488M   4% /lib/modules/2.6.15-29-k7/volatile
/dev/hdb1             233G   33M  233G   1% /big/hdb1
/dev/sda1             190G   33M  190G   1% /big/sda1
/dev/hde1             190G   82G  109G  43% /big/hde1
/dev/hdg1             190G  167G   24G  88% /big/hdg1
/dev/hdi1             299G  267G   32G  90% /big/hdi1
/dev/hdk1             299G  130G  169G  44% /big/hdk1
/dev/hda1             449M  9.4M  416M   3% /boot
/dev/hda3              37G  2.1G   35G   6% /usr
nfsd                     0     0     0   -  /proc/fs/nfsd