16-disk SW RAID-6 on RHEL?

[Peter Ruprecht]

Hi everyone,

I could use a little advice.  I'm considering setting up a 16-disk 
software RAID-6 system for use as a samba fileserver.  The disks would 
be 2TB SATA in an external enclosure attached via SAS to the server 
(RHEL5, 2x Xeon E5420 processors with 4 cores, 16 GB RAM).

I have done software RAID-5 with 6 disks and gotten satisfactory 
performance, but has anyone else tried SW RAID on a bigger scale?  Would 
that just be nuts?

So why not just buy a HW RAID system?  Well, in this case cost is a big 
issue.  Also, in the past I've had some issues with RAID controllers 
freaking out leaving all the data inaccessible, which I think is less 
likely with SW RAID.

Finally, is there a reasonable RH-compatible alternative to xfs for a 
16TB+ filesystem?  Or is xfs now less iffy than it was a few years ago?

Thanks in advance,
Peter Ruprecht