There may be marginal speed benefits from RAID 5, since I *think* there is some striping, but its not like RAID 1 (RAID 0? I get those confused--whichever is striping but no redundancy), which really is faster even with the same speed drives. That said, I have yet to have speed problems reading from these drives when playing music. Writing is a different matter. When updating tags, the terastation is very slow. But, since I usually am updating tags while doing something else, it really hasn't annoyed me too much.
One aspect of networked/computer based audio that I didn't mention is that I get to hear a bunch of stuff that I ordinarily wouldn't throw in the CD player. I can just set the thing on random play with the whole collection while I'm working on something else, and its amusing what pops up. I've actually probably heard a greater variety of what is in my collection--albums or songs I've forgotten--than I did before. There is also an embarrassing amount of "what-the-heck-is-that"--songs/artists I've forgotten, some of which provokes some rather interesting memories.
I think my next project is actually ripping my classical CDs and getting those out of the living room as well. I've resisted doing it so far, because classical doesn't seem quite as amenable to "random" play or playlists, but I'm beginning to see how it really could work. Think I'm probably going to have to get another terastation for those...
I should also mention that another nice aspect of the terastation is that its actually pretty quiet. My other RAID 5 setup--a Dell Powervault 745N--is like a 747 on take-off. My original concept was stuffing it in a closet, but even in a closet it would require an acoustic cabinet. The terastation is a much smaller, more friendly form factor and it is realistic to put it almost anywhere.
