Thanks. Yeah, I left it a little vague as to not sway any opinions. I definitely want at least minimal redundancy on both arrays just to ease the hassle of recovering from a disk failure. I guess I'm really trying to decide if hardware RAID is the way to go, or if letting a fast disk controller hand off the work to software (e.g., zfs) is a better option.
Anyway, I'm just curious to hear what others are doing especially given all the "RAID is dying" talk that's popped up in the last few years.
The zfs question is one I'm debating. I actually already use FreeNAS on the backup server and it seems to be doing well. For the primary server I want an OS I can do more with on, so I'd probably throw something like CentOS on it and then run VMs for specific tasks or to use more bleeding edge distributions. I suppose I could try zfs in Linux.