Just thought I'd throw one more thing into the ring...
Though I can't find a VAR anywhere in the States that has them, RAIDCore 8 port SATA devices can be found on Ebay with great regularity. Now, many of you suggest that there is no need for SATA, but with a converter costing ~$18 and PATA HD's down around $0.25/gig if you can find a good deal, the cost of making a PATA drive into an SATA drive is rather negligible, especially considering the capacities involved.
So, a RAIDCore card runs about $320 on average on ebay, and it has online expansion. Assuming you pay $18 per converter, that means you'll end up forking out around $450 for the card and converters once you've filled up all the ports. Also, the RAIDCore has absolutely amazing performance and is PCI-X (for those of us with motherboards that support it). Not that it matters very much for a media server, but...you know...bragging rights

.
Best I can find, the PATA 8 port Escalade runs about $280 and you don't need a converter with PATA drivers. The downside is your stuck with a fixed array.
So if you wanted to run, say, 250gig drives on the array, you need to buy all the drives you're ever going to want in the array. Right now, that's going to cost you $1200 (8x150).
Meanwhile, if you start with three drives and then add a drive to the RAIDCore when you find a good deal on a drive, you could conceivably expand with your needs and get the drives for an average of - say - $0.35/gig. That works out to an end cost of ~$900 (150x3 + 87.5x5). Which is just about the difference between the cards + adapters.
One more thing. Apparently the Escalade has problems with more than one controller per PCI bus? The RAIDCore is not supposed to have that problem, so if you wanted to buy a case to hold 16 drives, you would be wasting 8 bays if you went with an Escalade.
And wouldn't one run into a problem finding an 8 drive non-RAID controller in order to do software RAID in the first place?
I really don't know where I was going with this, but...yeah, I think that summarizes the situation.
Oh, and Tomshardware has a review of the raidcore that shouldn't be more than a google search away.
And I'm done.