After reviewing my needs, my budget, and the fact that the budget has to account for a mailserver, a DNS server as well as IDS and a heap of other hardware, I've decided that cost and data redundancy are the two big criteria I need to look at. I'll settle for just mirroring as long as it's hardware mirroring. After reading all of the info provided on this list, I decided that setting up a decent hardware raid based on SATA is not something I should jump into without taking it slow and I need to do this soon. I also looked on Ebay Australia and found a ton of 2 channel SATA winraids, all of which are useless for my purposes. Then I found one of these: http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid/megaraid_i4.html It's description: Low-cost, hardware-based data protection for cost-sensitive server and workstation environments And it lists RHEL 2 & 3 in the supported software. (and thereby probably 4 as well right?) If I can just get by with mirroring till the hardware budget is in better condition, I can just upgrade it to a 3ware and SATA later on. Ironically I could not see much in the way of decent SATA hardware raid controllers on ebay australia, (no 3ware at all actually) but there were tons of scsi 360 raid cards and drives going cheap. how funny is that. does anyone have any comments on the megaraid i4 ???? rgds Franki