[clug] advice on drives for raid

[Nemo]

Hi all

I'm in the process of building up a new machine to be the personal file
server I need it to be - and I'm thinking of going down the "multiple
1TB drives in a raid5" configuration. 

At first glance the idea is 4x 1TB drives, with 900GB of each in raid5
for roughly 2.7TB shared space, the remaining 100gb to be split between
system space, and more paranoid raid1 /home and /backup spaces. 

The case is small however so heat is a concern - as is then noise once
I put in fans to handle the heat issue... so I'm thinking of mixing
a couple of seagate 1TB (which seem to be striving for reasonable
performance) and a couple of western digital 1TB (which run quieter at
cooler, at a performance loss).

The logic here is that I don't overheat the case too much, and also can
protect myself against a lemon batch of drives. (I wasn't bitten by, but
still remember the IBM deskstars). I know that performance will be
dictated by the 'weakest link' logic, but between improved CPU/ram and
gigabit NIC for the NFS shares, it should be improved over what I have
now anyway :)

I've also been pointed at LVM, but have no experience with... 

Can anyone offer thoughts on all this? Good/bad/hopeless?

.../Nemo
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                                                    earth native