Just sharing my 5 cents, How stringent is your requirement that this be external storage? My home server (currently at 1.25TB) is using a Super Micro SATA hot-swap drive cage. Five drives take up three bays in a mini-server tower (case has a total of 9 bays). I have another cage installed, but no controller for it as of yet. I have 4 of the 5 drives connected to onboard SATA and one connected to a pci sata controller. The boot drive is PATA, and the cdrom is external usb2. Hot-swap seems to work ... although I haven't tried to remove a drive hot, I have added two. With a custom kernel and recompiling some tools, you can add hot-growable soft-RAID5 support to Centos, or if you have the funding, a hardware raid controller would be awesome. The cages' stock fan isn't very quiet but that's an easy remedy, it's just a standard 92mm fan. Gordon _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos