Oh, I dunno. We haven't seen many persistently bad SATA chips/cards out there yet. Speaking of which, DealExtreme.com has some good 2-port Silicon Image based SATA cards. I have that exact card here and it's cheap and no-fuss. But only two SATA ports (one of the ports has both an external and internal connector to choose from).

EDIT: I should caution that I haven't used a 1TB or 2TB drive with this controller yet. And it's only ever seen Linux, so I dunno how things might behave with a different O/S that might lack built-in SATA drivers.

One brand I tell everyone to avoid is HighPoint. Their "RAID" firmware overwrites a data sector at power-on on any attached drive, for the "meta data". Problem is, it does this unconditionally, regardless of whether you actually use the BIOS setup to "configure" the drive for RAID, JBOD, or not at all.

This kinda peeves people who expect their own data to be in the overwritten sector..

Cheers