I figure if raid 6 gives adaquate performance. Why the heck not? So I have switched most production raids over to it. Decent caching controllers seem to keep things moving along even with the wrtie penalties involved. These are fairly large spindle groups we are talking about here.

Any host that needs to boot from some local disks, gets simple raid 1 with a global hot spare. Storage is dolled out from lowly MD3000i's.