Question on Lion Server & RAID

I'm thinking of building a Lion server to replace my WHS machine.

Does anyone know if it has any hard drive monitoring? Of if I'm better off with RAID done on mono or in software for that?

I recently had the drive on my MacBook go bad & I had no warnings, notice or anything from Lion, I only found out with a 3rd party tool after weeks of crashes. I don't want to build a server, put all my stuff on it & lose something.

Software RAID all the way.
Even though it disgusts me to say, there is almost no such thing has hardware RAID these days.
If you even try to buy a $1000 RAID card, you often find it comes with an ARM or Intel IOP CPU that runs a mini embedded O/S which treats the disks attached like Linux md's.
So you buy what you think is a high performance H/W RAID card only to get a medium performance mini Linux or BSD computer on a card.
I'd rather have an Intel i5 3+ GHz driving the I/O of my disks than some 1GHz ARM.

I don't really see any major HDD monitoring improvements in Lion yet. So keep SMARTmontools to hand to check you HDD status.

Awesome, thanks for the info. Right now I have RAID-5 on the mobo on my WHS machine. It's really the last windows machine I have & just want to go Mac all the way.

I gotta say hard drive monitoring was something I'd always assumed was in OS X. It wasn't until I was beta testing Lion & my system started crashing I found out there was a problem. At first I chalked it up to beta bugs, then it keep crashing on GM & I found a SMART monitoring tool & leaned the drive was bad.

Thanks for the advice!

Glad to help.
The English weather is quite bad at the moment so it's good to stay in and answer posts.