hardware raid solutions?

[Eric S. Johansson]

I need a relatively low-cost hardware raid solution (not pseudo 
hardware) so I can implement raid five on the root and boot partitions. 
  For a variety of reasons, I would take quite a bit of convincing to 
use software raid for this application.

Serial ATA or parallel ATA solutions are fine.  The only caveat being 
that parallel ATA solutions use only 1 Disk Drive per cable.  it would 
also be nice if there was some form of monitoring software that could 
send me a notice saying that a disk drive has failed.

I've done a bunch of searching and there is no hardware vendor that 
stands out in a good way.  So, I would appreciate opinions from folks on 
what has worked well for them and what has failed.

many thanks
--- eric