Edwin: "My suggestions [...]"

Well, interesting to see that Powerquest wasn't ever able to fix Drive Image. PartitionMagic was/is so good I figured they had to be smart enough to get it right.

When you mentioned "network" under Ghost, that made me look at the current product specs. They got rid of the "Enterprise"/"Personal" versioning scheme that meant that you used to have to spend big $$$ for Enterprise version to Ghost over a network. Excellent. Upgrade time.

On the hardware/software RAID issue, my working definition of "hardware RAID" is that the relevant calculations are performed on the RAID controller itself (it doesn't pass them back and forth through the CPU/drivers before writing to the array) and that, being hardware, it is not necessarily OS-dependent (such that you can bootstrap the controller and create RAID array/stripes before you even install the OS). By those criteria, I don't think the FastTrak series of products qualifies as "hardware"; Promise product literature makes the distinction that the SuperTrak series of products are "hardware" (promise!) and you certainly pay more as a result; no experience with these on my part.

Anandtech has a decent review of IDE RAID options here: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1491

Whatever its faults (Via chipset problems) and limitations (RAID 1-only) I'm surprised they didn't cover the Arco products, but a lot of times that just means they couldn't get a review unit.

Jim