Hey thanks for the reply. Yes raid is a must as I will have redundancy in the event of a failure. That's why I prefer using raid 5 as I can have a single drive fail. Replace,rebuild, good to go... I use Western digital red Nas series drives so the odds of them failing are slim. The other main reason I use raid is so the OS see's all the disks as one physical drive. Having my media archived on multiple drives in multiple directories would be a absolute pain! Not to mention speeds (read,write) would become a bottleneck in my setup. When it comes to programs applications such as plex it would be a absolute nightmare to have your media stored on multiple drives. I may just buy a good raid controller with dedicated 8 ports. Me being me decided to cheap out as Canada computers has the vantech controller I'm currently using for 70$.