Speaking of "raid thingy", I've been impressed by what I've seen/read of the Accusys ACS-7630 kit. It's basically a box with an inline raid-5 controller. You put 3 large IDE hard drives in it, connect it to an IDE controller that can recognize > 137GB drives, and it appears to your machine as a single large IDE drive with space equivalent to 2 of the 3 drives. You can hot-replace a bad drive and will auto-rebuild the replacement drive, all in hardware.

It seems that the box itself, which takes up two half-height 5.25 slots (er, or one full height...) in a desktop or server machine has another potential: put it in a firewire box and now you've got up to 600-640GB of PORTABLE RAID-5 FIREWIRE storage, all at a pre-drive cost of ~$600-650 if you shop well. I've seen the unit for $499, but today's search resulted in a low of $528ish.

Obviously, I've been lusting after this for a bit.

-brendan