Surely if you talking about raid and servers the fact that it's portable is immaterial?<br><br>Being a decently speced raid 5 system means that the chances of total failure are greatly reduced and even if it does fail totally you will have full backups to restore from.<br>
<br>As such I would say that hardware is the way to go. Let the board do all the work rather then the pc and if the os does stuff up the data should still be safe on the data partition where is can be recovered.<br>