Which disk controllers work best with Linux?

[Adam Nielsen]

Hi all,

After a recent fire in one of our data centres, it's time to go 
shopping.  As I've had many problems in the past trying to get 
half-decent performance out of the drive controllers in Dell servers, 
I'd like to know what others' experiences are.

I don't need anything spectacular, but I'd like to have a dozen or so 
people able to load their Word docs at the same time without it grinding 
to a halt.  Annoyingly I can get great performance out of Dell desktop 
PCs with the same kernel version, just not out of the servers I've had 
in the past.

Mostly this seems to be caused by the disks being connected to an awful 
hardware RAID controller, but I don't think Dell offer any servers using 
the same onboard Intel SATA controllers that work really well on desktop 
PCs.  Haven't yet had a server with SAS disks, but as they all go 
through a hardware RAID controller I'm a little dubious...

So any suggestions/experience would be much appreciated!

Many thanks,
Adam.