>With disk drive prices as cheap as they are today, generally you see
>"raid 0+1", where you build either a stripe of mirrored components, or

I don't know about cheap.  Sure disks are less expensive than ever, but it
is usually that you get bigger disks for the same money - try buying a 2G 
or even 4G disk from Sun these days.

By the time you have the number of spindles you want and the number
of controllers they need you typically have 2-3 times the storage space 
you want and the disk sub-systems represents a decent percentage of 
system cost.  Even on my p166 here, the disks add up to about 50% of
total cost of the system (not including the monitor).

But yes, we tend to use raid 0+1.

--sjg