If you get out of the house, you'll learn that the plot to "A Bug's Life" was just a re-hash of Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai", as was Galaxy Quest and just about every other comedic action film on the planet.

You might want to check out raidreconf (http://unthought.net/raidreconf/ which will allow you to add disks (although it's rather slow) to a RAID-0 or RAID-5. I cover this in the book, to a certain degree.

I do agree though, you hit on some issues with the md driver. There have been some recent discussions on linux-raid about how to help integrate RAID and LVM in the context of EVMS and other user space tools. I think that by this time next year, a lot of the mess/overlap between the two will be cleaned up.

One careful consideration with ATA RAID is that many of the controllers are not really hardware RAID. I don't think this is the case with the SX4000, but many low-end ATA RAID controllers (especially the on-motheboard flavors) are just software RAID in disguise.

Derek Vadala