3ware RAID cards are a very robust hardware RAID solution which work under Linux.
If you use these cards though, the ’3dm2′ web interface and command line interface only give limited information about the health of the drive.
Fortunately the standard tool smartctl can access the drives as if they were directly connected to the system like this:
smartctl -d 3ware,X --all /dev/twa0
Where X is the index (0…n) of the drive you want to check.