I am thinking of setting up a RAID 5 PATA disk array as a backup
volume. Performance isn't a huge issue, but reliability is.

I know some of the people on this list must be running software RAID
5. Based on your experiences, would you recommend software RAID 5 for
this purpose?

I personally like software RAID 1 but I know the algorithms used with
RAID 5 make this setup significantly more complicated.

Cheers!
Eric