Thanks for your input, but...

... that will not give me hot-swap capability.  Plus it gives me the
overhead of worrying about another whole linux system (and my linux
sysadmin skills are marginal, I'm much better with Solaris).  We
actually do have some internal raids like this on some of our linux
systems, and they're a pain to deal with if you lose a disk.  We also
have 12-disk external raid box with hot swap capability hooked up to a
Sun and it's so simple to deal with if a single disk goes south.
Unfortunately, the size of the disks is small and going the Sun route is
prohibitively expensive right now.

I started my search by just looking for a raid card and external box
with hot-swap capability that I could hook up to one of our existing
linux boxes, but again, most of the stuff I found seemed to be geared
toward windows.  I'm no linux guru, and when faced with installing
cards, flashing bios, installing drivers (if they exist), etc, I was a
bit daunted.  When I heard about a standalone networked solution, it
seemed ideal.  Also, a lot of the good-looking raid cards were PCIe, and
we don't seem to have that type of slot on our linux boxes.  Others were
so expensive as to be prohibitive.

Also, one of my colleagues previously set up a raid in an external box
hooked to a linux machine (he was much more profficient than me at linux
admin) and it crashed and burned at some point.  We never could figure
out exactly why, but it was suggested that it was somehow linked with
having the raid card and the disks powered by different power supplies.
 That could be a totally bogus conclusion, but it does make me leary.

Anyway.  These standalone networked stoarge devices seem a simple and
reasonably priced alternative - if they will do what they seem to promise.

So if anyone has any input on any of the models mentioned, I would
greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

-Jonathan