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performance of a backend comes down to one thing. Interrupts. The less
you're asking your backend to contend with, the more stable the box.
Running a 4-drive Raid5, plus tuner cards, and you're going to be
saturating the PCI bus, plus dealing with thousands of interrupts per
second. Each of those have a chance to cause another thread/write/read
to pause/delay/hitch, especially on cheap consumer motherboards. You
can end up with glitched recordings, driver issues, OS/stability
issues, etc.

This isn't to say that software raid will kill Myth. It doesn't. It
can work just fine at the lower end of the performance scale.
Some people will run 8 drives, plus 4 tuners, 24/7 and never have a
problem. I'd field a guess however, that out of 10 people trying that,
8 will have issues. As soon as your start commercial flagging, HD
playback, recording, and transcoding, all at the same time, you are
rolling the dice. For myself personally, the BEST thing I ever did get
a hardware raid card, and serverworks chipset motherboard.  5% cpu
usage under SERIOUS disk and ethernet loads, stable as a rock. I
routinely see bandwidth levels on the primary GIG-E on my backend in
the 400Mbit - 600Mbit range during "normal" evenings.

Anyway, just my 2cents...