Thanks for the advice and link LittleBlueThing! I'm reall starting to believe Linux *is* my best bet, and I probably should go with that. Even if it'll probably cause me a few days of frustration because it's all new to me. But hey, it's a challenge!
On that subject does any one know if any of the Linux distributions treat RAID as a first class citizen yet ?
Last time I installed a RAID box 18 months ago none of the distributions made RAID easy during installation. I tried to take a look at the latest Ubuntu installer the other day to see if things had improved, but it kept crashing as it loaded the kernel on the two machines I tried it on.