[geeks] Recommendations for Home-Use RAID

[J. Alexander Jacocks]

I have a Yellow Machine RAID (http://yellowmachine.com, though the company's
out of business) that I store all my archived data on.  Right now, it has 4
500gb PATA disks in it, and is running RAID-5.

The YM works, and is reliable, but has several items that are annoying:
1) write speed is abominable
2) security controls are lacking
3) user interface is poor, and deadly slow, to boot

So, I'm looking for suggestions for a replacement device, or setup.  If
possible, I'd prefer to re-use the PATA disks that I have (I have a ton of
250gb and 500gb disks), and I'd like to significantly improve my write
performance.

Any experiences/suggestions?  I know the YM's lack of write performance is
due to lack of RAID-5 cache, combined with slow CPU.

Thanks!

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