I've been following this thread's progression with great interest and I can really empathize with Cris and the others. I am also a Linux challenged individual.
With the help of some members on the board I built a NAS out of an old computer of mine. (the thread is around somewhere... ah- here it is.)
It works great (thanks to all!) but this thread has me thinking I need to further my understanding of the device.
For example- I have no idea how to check the health of the unit or recover from a failed drive. I'll certainly have to learn about that soon.

Anyway, I just saw the For Sale posts of Neutrino's and wondered if the following scenario is a possibility under Linux:
Use an IDE expansion PCI card (I'm thinking most often such cards are sold as 'raid controllers', but I haven't investigated this at all, so I may be going in the wrong direction) to allow more drives to be connected to the motherboard. Instead of combining the drives as under 'hardware raid', just leave them as individual drives and let the linux raid use them. You could boot off of one of the motherboard's IDE headers and if *that* drive went south, then reinstalling linux shouldn't be a big deal.

What I'm thinking about is this- in my homebrew NAS, the three drives are partitioned such that the linux install is strewn over all of the units (I'm not even sure exactly how it was set up, so forgive my lack of detail and understanding). It seems that any one failed drive requires that the linux install be recreated before the raid5 array could be rebuilt from the remaining drives.
It just seems that if I want to protect myself against failed drives, then treating each drive as a single partition and single element in the array should make things 'easier'. Sounds less complex to me, but then again I don't know what I'm talking about and that's why I'm asking...
Am I off base?

My kit is soo old that my motherboard won't boot from PCI or USB. That's why I was thinking I could expand the capacity for drives with a card.
Hmmm- maybe if I want to localize my linux install but keep my hardware setup as-is I could boot and run from a purpose-built live CD. ?? again, I'm going off on tangents that I'm not sure are really needed.

Hey, if you got this far I really want to thank you for reading! LOL