re: motherboard controller struggling to handle it. Performance is definitely fine for a data storage volume, it's coping fine with two other computers running video off the volume as well. However I have had the computer crash occasionally when running four f1s, a raptor and an ssd off the same intel ich10r. OCZ forums thought this was overloading the southbridge, but all I could find on google was my own thread asking if the ssd had gone bad. Since I moved the raptor off its been fine, but I am a bit more reluctant to add a fifth samsung to the array as a result of this.
No, this is not possible.
I disagree.
example, three 320gb drives, /dev/sd[a,b,c], one 1tb drive /dev/sdd
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
mdadm --assemble /dev/md0
mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/md0 /dev/sdd1
mdadm --assemble /dev/md1
mount /dev/md1 /mnt/raid
Everything is a file.
You'll have about 30gb left over in this case, which could probably be a boot volume if you were careful.
It's not true hardware raid, but mdadm doesn't trail too badly in performance from the raid 5 benchmarks I looked up months ago