Software RAID5 in Linux with mdadm is a great way to gain massive amounts of disk space which are required for storing digital media, with the added security of data redundancy incase one of the disks in the array fail. Many people will point out that software RAID5 performance is horrible, but as the article points out, with multicore CPU's there is little point in offloading such a ’small’ task. (Note : home use here, wouldn't run a 300GB database on this, off course).