Best way to set up Raid 5?

[JoshFink]

I'm wondering if anyone out there is doing Raid5 for a datastore and how they are doing it?

I'm interested in taking 8 - 750gb hard drives, putting them into a case and attaching it directly to my iMac via FW800, or the other options is to use NAS over Gigabit ethernet.

The only thing I'm using this for is Movie storage and Music storage.

Questions
1) What enclosures are you guys doing?
2) Are you doing HardWare or Software Raid 5?
3) Is it possible to do software Raid 5 on a NAS device?

I have more questions but I lost my train of thought.

Thanks

Josh

[witness]

I just use an Asus bare bone box for an enclosure and use Linux to create a NAS that can be used for other services also.

This setup works with both hardware and software raid, but I much prefer hardware for performance and reliability. If reliability is you thing, then make sure that you get a raid card with a battery backup, or turn off the onboard cache/memory for writes.

3Ware and LSI cards are usually very good. Beware that many RAID 5 cards are not really hardware and use "drivers" to do the parity, but then if it's a dedicated NAS, processor usage might not be an issue.