Wow! Thanks Mark!

Well my hardware RAID recovery didn't go quite how I wanted. I didn't loose my data in the event of loosing a drive, which I did with my previous software RAID attempts. But, I couldn't get the thing to rebuild.

I can really see the disadvantage of not having any tools to monitor the array. I think that the drive would begin to recover, but when I re-booted it started over. I couldn't see a way of checking, even from the command line in freenas, what stage the rebuild was at. The only place tht told me that was the RAID's BIOS.

So I am still torn between both solutions. I like both for different reasons. I do have enough spare HD's to run 4 x 250Gb and 3 x 120Gb arrays so maybe I'll run both side by side and directly compare how I cope with recovery etc....

I could of course just drop back to a simple mirror and forget RAID5, but I really want that extra 250Gb.

Cheers

Cris.