Well, I was suggesting that roger take that 6 year old machine and make a linux fileserver out of it. Windows is complete garbage and I think people should use it for the absolute minimum, which would be games and PC-only applications. As a game system, Windows is adequate, although a bit expensive...

I have found linux software RAID to be extremely reliable for the last 6 years I've been using it. A bad spindle killed one of my RAID0 arrays, as expected, but I've recovered from bad spindles with the software RAID5 just fine. It seems to "just work", and the linux filesystem is about 10,000X faster and more reliable than anything from Microsoft when you have a whole bunch of files on it (like a big photo or music collection).

I had no idea it was actually faster than using a hardware RAID controller. but that's pretty cool. I had never tested it myself, but everything I'd read suggested it would be slower, especially using RAID5.

Mark, does your statement hold true for RAID5, or do the hardware controllers make a difference there?

Jim