Good for Redundancy; Bad for Reliability (Score 1)

I assume you're talking about software RAID since you're building RAIDs from cheap IDE drives. Software RAID is a cheap and easy way to protect your data, but if you're looking for availability, pricier SCSI RAID cards and such are the only way to go.

I use Linux Software RAID on my web server, and had a hard drive crash just last week. All the data was protected on the good drive; however, when the IDE drive failed, the entire system crashed with it. And since the BIOS was set to boot from the bad disk, simply rebooting it didn't fix the problem. I had to manually go into the BIOS to get it to boot from the good disk.

I still plan to use IDE RAID, because it's a great way to cheaply back up my data. However, if you're looking for uptime and reliability, stay away from cheap IDE drives.