New PC's. Raid 5 Storage Solutions Help Please.

[DAVID HARRIS <dh140770@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ho folks.

I am in the lucky / unlucky situation that my home PC has gone kaput, and
after replacing the motherboard (54 quid), and finding out it isn't the
motherboard after all I'm considering building a new machine,

However we are also on the brink of building a HTPC too which i want to be
quiet.

Here is the plan.

1. Build HTPC with boot drive and 1 data storage drive (300gb).  This will
be enough to cover the day to day PVR requirements.  It will also ensure
that it is pretty quiet as i can use a passive power supply.  This will be
used for Media Centre Edition duties only.

2. Build new 'Home Office' PC to do the regular stuff, and house some
serious storage as a back end to the HTPC, but also to keep all our data
safe.  I recently suffered a disk failure, and although it was recoverable,
it is a serious pain and you realise how precious your data is.

The Home Office presents me with the dilemma.

I already have 3 x 160gb Parallel ATA disks.  One can be redeployed as the
bootdisk on the HTPC so that will leave 1 bookdisk for the Office PC, plus
a ghosted disk incase the HTPC bootdisk goes belly up.  (I can live without
the office PC for longer).

I am thinking of a RAID 5 solution as I think it provides the best price,
performance, reliability trade off.  If this is wrong let me know !!
The RAID set will hold video, mp3's, pictures, documents etc

Trouble is which way to go ???
1. Motherboard Raid 5.  Abit and Asus motherboard have this, and it is the
cheapest option, but i don't like the idea of if the motherboard breaks it
is a pain to get data back (or impossible)
2. Rocketraid.  The cheapest controllers i have seen.  Are they any good
for a Home Office PC / HTPC server
3. Adaptec. Seem to be better but i can't find many reviews.
4. All in one box.  Buffalo, Thecus.  More expensive than an 'in pc'
solutions, and they don't seem to have the 'through-put' to support HTPC.

Lots of options, but which way to go.
The PC;s will be linked via 1gb ethernet.

Any comments / help very welcome.

Thanks

Dave





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]