Looking to build a small-mid sized storage server and I'm looking for
a
couple suggestions...

Going to be using eight 250gig SATA drives in a RAID 5 (?)
configuration
and
was wondering what I should consider for a controller. Are there any
mainboards that would support this configuration? Add on controller
cards?

We don't want to lose data on these drives (there will be a separate
drive
for the C:/ System files) as well as get the best performance possible.

The reason I'm considering onboard is that performance could be better
if
we
can avoid using the PCI bus for the controller.

Unless you're using GbE network connections to the clients, the
bottleneck (on anything but a very busy fileserver) will be the
network, not the drives. Without GbE you don't need high
performance drives/configurations.

System will have GBit ethernet for sure.

Onboard controllers which use their own chip, not a southbridge
integral feature, ARE on the PCI bus. There is no gain to having
such an integral chip rather than it sitting on a PCI card. It
is exactly the same situation if it were placed in same PCI slot
such that it had same IRQ.

My Asus P4C800E has the Intel Raid controller (as well as a Promise
controller) and the Intel part doesn't utilize the PCI bus. I was hoping
another higher end board might have taken this farther.

What I'm looking at now is: http://www.raidcore.net/RC4000DataSheet_2.pdf

In this Lian Li chassis....
http://www.lian-li.com/product.php?a...wPD&prdid=1210


...and I almost forget. This will most likely be an Athlon64 system (unless
you can convince me otherwise)

: )