Hello, My thanks to everyone for many helpful replies on this topic. Right now this box will be ide raid1 mirroring, i've got two drives in it, although at some point probably within the next six months or so i'm going to expand with another drive. I do not have experience with hardware raid cards, although i've heard plenty of good things about them, financially they're just not in my budget and i've implemented software raid1 on other Unix systems before, and that has saved me much hard times, in fact one box is currently running off the slave drive, the master drive died and it's waiting for me to replace it, so i quite like software raid and wanted to implement it on this new CentOS box. Thanks again. Dave.