> One drawback is software raid wants a single ide device on each ide > channel. > This means buying an ide card (if you want more than two devices) > which doesn't > always play well with the rest of the system (4+ ide devices). Some > mainboards > might have more than two ide channels, but I just opted for the cheap > ide card. thats easy. SATA. one device per channel. you can get 8 ports or more of SATA on a PCI-X or PCI-Express x4 card. parallel IDE is dead. except, I've never heard of any such limitation, other than the potential performance bottleneck.