Ok, of all the 'bad' stuff you listed, would you use any of those?
I've never used Firewire. Never needed it.
Never had a use for dual-LAN. NICs are so cheap nowadays, thats no longer an issue.
As for RAID...I've never used it either (shocking, I know
), but as Sax can tell you,
it boosts OS performance significantly. I just find the hardware overhead too much to
stomach, and HDDs have not reached the level of reliability for me to be comfortable with
such a setup.
Not having e-SATA can be an issue, if you have some e-SATA devices, but if its any consolation,
any e-SATA device/enclosure you buy comes with cable attached to a backplate, so you can convert a
SATA port on the motherboard to e-SATA.
At its current price it should cost just about 800 TT (including Ezone freight) to import it,
plus a lil 'summin summin' for my trouble.
What say you?