Hi,

I recently bought a cheap 7 disc UW case with 7 4,5GB drives. Is it 
reasonable to get a cheap DPT Raid controller or should I prefer 
softwareraid? Should I expect performance advantages of either 
solution and would a cache on the controller be of any good and 
does softwareraid a good job when it comes to hot swap of drives? 

This is a production system, so I am restricted in my possibilities to 
test.

I still need one Linux machine to run Win32 under vmware, I thought 
I could mount parts of the Raid by NFS, specially the virtual disk 
files used for vmware. Does this sound stupid to anyone, or is there 
a better solution someone can recommend?

I remember I had problems some years ago when I tried to boot 
from high SCSI ids (8-16) is there something known I should 
consider?

Thnaks in advance,

mike