ESX Storage

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OK So its time to upgrade the storage on my VMWare Lab at home and make it more my production training lab and I was wondering what other people had put in place for there storage. The plan is I will rebuild the whole setup from scratch as I hacked up the configs pretty bad when I was studying for my VCP and would like the new setup to have nothing in the background to bite me on the a$$ in the future.

My current lab has the following
3 x ML115 G5 running ESX4
2 x ML115 G5 running openfiler
2 x DLink 1224t Gig switches (Storage is on a separate vlan)

The 2 openfiler servers were done on the cheap as I had 2 old LSI Logic 150-6 RAID Cards sitting around doing nothing so I just purchased 3 x 1TB SATA II 7200 disks for each server. The MegaRAID Cards are PCI and are connected to 32 bit PCI slots, it works but it isn’t fast. For the last 6 months I have been saving the pennies and I now have £1000 which is burning a hole in my pocket to fix the storage bottle neck

Plan A

Adaptec 5405 (£300)
4 x Hitachi 300GB SAS 15k Hard disks (£800)

I know my math’s sucks and I will have to live with being £100 in overdraft, I could set this up as a RAID5 or a RAID10 and use this as my main storage and leave the second openfiler server as backup storage for servers I'm not currently using. I would also install and boot openfiler via USB

Plan B

2 x Adaptec 5405 (£600)
1 x ML115 G5 (£300)

I could get this stuff in place and see a performance improvement from upgrading from a PCI RAID Card to using PCI-e, the disks would then become the bottleneck and I can replace them as and when I have spare cash. The extra ML115 is just so I can test lab designs over multiple clusters and I want another one before they stop making them.

Plan C

I'm all ears. Anyone have any dedicated storage devices like the StorCenter ix4 ??