If you need to buy an additional controller why not get a simple IDE RAID controller, offering RAID 0 + 1? You would need to but an extra disk too for RAID 0 + 1. This allows you to stripe and mirror accross the channels providing better performance and protection. Adaptec and Promise both have 2 and 4 channel products for between £60 and £250 (I guess that would be $100 - $400). Take a look at Adaptec's ATA RAID 1200 / 2400 and Promise's FastTrak controllers. Some of these even offer RAID 5. If you have a bigger budget, Promise do a Supertrak 100 6 Channel RAID 5 Controller (E1147) for about £300 (I guess that will be about $450). Both these options use hardware RAID so you don't have to worry about using LVM - the array would show up as a single device. -- Simon Oliver