Didn't want you to think we were ignoring ya, it's just that me & Tex don't have any experience with any of that hardware. You might try asking on his site too, his forums are quite active.

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You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?

Great tutorial article on Raid at Linux Planet. Covers both hardware and software raid, and different raid levels.

First, Linux is good for SMP(2 cpus), hypertransport pipeline and hyperthreading and DDR memory computer architecture. Then, it has load balansing, Posix RTOS, dram centric livecd with unionfs, wireless WiFi, etc. I am leaving out all the other goodies which a good Linux operating system will install on your latest hardware.
Unfortunately, Linux operating system is not Apple with a single purpose; OSX(BSD) will install anything without driver considerations.
Not all hardware are affordable to Linux developers, and your expensive peripherals are often lacking drivers. You are better off buying a certified Linux machine. Which the Linux included is fine tuned for your computer.
Having said that, you are better off with some of the older components, which the 10,000 one man Linux shops can afford. Some livecd can boot your older computers in a flash. This is the state of art in Linx today. If you should build a latest technology machine, try Puppy(universal backward compatible drivers), Mepis, Knoppix then IBM AIX 5L, in that order. IBM unix/Linux operating system is the final word on Linux for your computer.

Now, Linux comes with many flavours, distro-ed by 10,000 one man shops of limited resources. You have to search for driver compatibility list of these distros before you built a computer. Otherwise, you have no end of fuss to find drivers to install for your latest fastest speed motherboards, with new chipset or components. Unless you are happy with universal backward compatible drivers.

Then, you have to find the flavours you like in each distro, and they may not be tranferable to each other. Fortunately livecd came to the rescue. You can do trial runs of many distros, very cheap at about $2.00 per cd. Buy them all and find the one you like; instead of downloading just one or two livecd that is. Don't ever install them on hdd, because the swap file(virtual memory) will slow your Linux machine down to Microsoft speed. Use hdd only for a persistant repository.

Good luck, and you will need it, for sure. 10,000 one man shops are wild at best. Livecd is a wise embedded approach; instead of dual boot or octo boot, etc. Speed of your machine will be fantastic..
Footnote: Livecd is dram centric, runs by drams only.

Tiny livecd Linux with about 50 mb of codes are often mistaked for lack of sophistication. People classified them for the third world digital subdivide. What in fact happened is that they use universal backward compatible drivers. One size fits all. Xvesa, SB pro, lineprinter, serial port external modem sets up almost all the computers out there. You do not have to install drivers, you configure them. There are luxurious drivers such as dhcpcd and WiFi managers application programs; but most stayed with dialup modems.
To have more sophisticated Linux drivers and cover most of the recent computers, you would have to go for Simply Mepis. which uses kudzu for driver installation and provide more functional drivers.
But Knoppix went one step further and give you all the free Linux application programs which are not captive. The full blown codes are approching 5 gb. If the first two Linux distros can run your computer, Knoppix will too. Most are Debian based, so far.
Then there is the IBM AIX 5L which has RedHat, Suse and TurboLinux compatibility with their SCO Unix origin. Porting over to AIX is perhaps easier in concept but too much protocols to learn.

There are many monitors available for Linux machines. There are dumb monitors and 8514 overleaf type IBM built. There are multisync NEC built and intelligent monitors. Then there are LCD monitors. All of them will work with Xvesa drivers; if Xfbdev servers are available in the Linux distro. If Xorg took over in the distro, then only monitor horizontal frequency is around 60 hz will work. On boot promt of any Linux distro, if you see commands such as fb800x600, use that cheat code for your monitor. Good luck, because many Linux distros did not take care of which monitor you have to use.

On older computers S3 video cards are all compatible. Trident and others are not. In latest computers, Nvidia and ATI Radeon are beginning to be compatible. Intel extreme video using ambiguous(analog devices DSP) maybe be handled by xorg. Sound card drivers go back to SB pro at address 220 and dma2. All sound cards not recognized are applied to sb pro drivers. The most popular sound chip today is CMI8738 used in sound cards and pctel hsp modems. The chipset is supported by Linux.

Linux 2.6.x was earmarked for ramdisk operation only; then use repository for data storage at the beginning or end of a session. But livecd did it with no fuss. So, now the hdd installation is very much out of running; because the virtual memory is too slow. Linux is basically a scsi architecture, everything is slower because of the emulation aspect. Pcmcia, USB, Eide, DVDrw, CDrw and raid are all going thru SCSI protocols. If you want software speed, you have to go native to scsi like Apple. But if at the end of a session you want to deposit your new data, any device is suitable. Newer Linux distros are tailoring their operating system with livecd and unionfs or squashfs to and fro ramdisks. Even floppy adaptors with flash memory inserted is appealing to Linux machines, but where are the drivers? The answer is udev in /usr, 2.6.x kernels.