Shalom Baruch.
I have been using a server with 3ware SATA raid for a year and a half now, and a Silicon something or other (built in with dell servers), on a variety of IDE RAID 0,1 and 5 levels. As you said: IDE is unreliable; I have experienced a 2 out of 10 disk failures. You can't beat IDE for price, I needed TERABYTES, and SCSI would cost me about 4K$/TB while in IDE you can reach the TB scale on about 1K$/TB w/ software RAID 5 (w/o the controller).
Nowadays, I wouldn't hesitate using software RAID (instead of the HW RAID I use). RAID initialization and maintenace can be performed decently with mdadm, even hotspares, etc, so it seems HW is not a must. The driver upgrade procedure for 3ware 7500 which I have is not simple, they require a simultaneous FIRMWARE, DRIVER and MONITORING/ CONFIGURATION SOFTWARE upgrade which was a bit cumbersome and costed quite a few hours to manage.
Cheers,
Miki Lewinger BGU
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