Since I am starting to re-rip in FLAC at an active rate now, I am running out of space on my main computer with the 200GB drive. I had planned for this and started building a server to house all my tunes. I also decided that it must have redundant storage. RAID5 has already been determined as the desired RAID level. I'm at the point now where I have to decide if I want hardware or software RAID.

I am using IDE disks. There is no question there. The only thing I need to know is if there is any compelling reason I should buy something like the Promise FastTrack SX4000 or just use what's built into Windows 2000 Advanced Server (my likely platform, but NT 4.0 is also an option).

If I go for software RAID, this would be the configuration:

• 1 - Samsung SP0602N 60GB Hard Disk. Used as the system disk connected to the motherboard's primary IDE controller.
• 3 - Samsung SP01604N 160GB Hard Disks. These three drives would be combined in a RAID5 array to achieve 320GB of space. I chose Samsung drives because they are quiet, cheap, and still come with a 3 year warranty.
• 3 - HighPoint Rocket133SB IDE adapters. These are cheap single channel PCI adapters with their own BIOS on board. I would like to use single channel adapters for the RAID drives because I would be able to monitor drive access with independent LEDs for each disk.

Anyone care to comment on that set up? It's going to take a lot more good points to convince me to use a RAID card over software than the DLT/DAT thing the other day.