I am starting to plan a replacement for my Dell PowerEdge 2300 and its RAID array. I am running out of space on the array and the combination of difficulties involved in extending the array and the fact that adding two extra 18Gb disks won't gain me much space is leading me to consider replacing the whole thing.

What I would like to do is replace it with a fanless mini-itx based machine (so I could then move it back indoors from the garage). There is no room of course in a mini-itx machine however for more than one disk.

I hadn't realised until today that you could use SATA on external drives. External SATA would seem to present a good solution, I can have a small boot drive inside the case and 2 or 3 external fanless drive enclosures (with the size of drives available now I might just for for two disks in RAID 1 rather tha 3 disks in RAID 5).

I would use a RocketRaid card or something similar. The box would be running either Win2k3 or Linux (most likely Win2k3 though as the photo album code I an writing is in ASP.NET).

Does this make any sense, has anyone here had any experience of external SATA ?

Are these cheap RAID cards like the RocketRaid totally hardware based like the PERC in my Dell or are they partly hardware and partly software ?

P.S. my current RAID array is going to be a pain to expand because I need to get all the firmware and drives upto date before expanding the NTFS volume will work. It seems to include updating the firmware for just about every piece of hardware in the box, in the right order, so to be honest I am too scared to attempt it. For the same reason I never have got round to fitting the second processor I bought on ebay.