[cougem]

So I've got a hell of a lot of storage, BUT they're all on IDE drives. How lame.

So what I'm thinking of is investing in a few SATA drives and making a RAID array, probably 5. 5 because there's little chance of me losing my data, and it's expandable. Also I think it's pretty universally supported. Thing is, how do I do this?

RAID controller cards seem INCREDIBLY expensive, and when I look to those dedicated boxes they're just as bad, even without the hard drives. So I was thinking, are they really much better than me buying a cheapish A64 procssor and RAID motherboard and making my own box with linux on it, and just using RAID like that? That would be software raid wouldn't it? Are the RAID controllers you see that much better than a processor would be at doing this stuff? What are the performance differences? I mean sluggishness doesn't REALLY matter on a dedicated box really.

Anyway, what do you guys think?

Thanks,

-James