Anyone using non avid raid 5's.  Here's one on Ebay (if the link doesn't work search for Item 310102732536)

Is a port multiplier totally out of the question?  In real situations- not just in theory.

I edit mostly from p2 source or XDCAM- so either DV or DVCPRO 50 or 100 or XDCAM.  

I have a MOJO(standard), but may be upgrading to MOJO DX or a used Adreniline HD.

I have routinly used USB drives on an Adreneline for XDCam HD without any problems.

At home I'm using 2 x SansDigital 4-drive 1RU chassis' with a 3-Ware 9690SA-8E controller.  So far, works great.  Each chassis has 4 x 1TB Seagate drives, in a separate RAID-5 array.  Each nets 2.75TB's

http://www.sansdigital.com/elitestor/es104ti.html

I use in all our avid's non avid raid 5 but very imortan for it is good contoler card(with ram on it and so on) in my case this is ARECA 16port SAS RAID PCIe x8 Controller IOP348-1200, RAID 0/1/3/5/6, 512MB Cache with 12 1GB drive i have about 11GB space and transfer about 600MB/s it rock solid work without any problem month ago one drive broken I only replace it with new one and don't stop work  raid rebuild when system was editing. 12 stream 1:1 now for me not a problem 12 PIP plays like a charm.

The ebay item you quoted uses what appears to be a controller card with SIL chipset. The SIL chipset gives you 20MB/s write and 40MB/s  read - not nearly fast enough for editing. The port multiplier itself is not a bottleneck, each port runs at 3Gb/s and can support 4 or 5 drives with minor performance penalty.

I'm looking at Raid5 boxes that have the controller built into the box, that doesn't require a high performance raid controller in each workstation. For example this one.

http://www.areca.com.tw/products/esatausb.htm

http://www.provantage.com/areca-technology-arc-5020~7AREC01P.htm

Has anybody had experience with these boxes? Rockwell is working a new Raid 5 chip that is supposed to be out soon and should drop the prices again.

I've found this on the Mac forum a while ago, don't remember the exact thread but if You find it to be interesting may be worth running a search over there.

The Firmtek enclosure looks great but I believe at that price it should inlcude a Raid 5 controller in the box. Hopefully we will see Raid5 boxes that include the controller soon. Compare to Areca 5020.