The 3ware site has lots of interesting white papers and benchmarks that anyone considering IDE RAID should look at. I know of many people using them for video editing with great success. I would be interested to hear about anyone's experience with them. I first purchased the card to use for a workstation in corporate. This was a nice alternative to SCSI for us for a couple of reasons.
Price is always a motivating factor.
I have been using the Promise ATA 100 RAID card, and have been very happy with its performance. It delivers what it claims to do, high-speed RAID on IDE with little to no hassle. The kernel would not boot. The good news is I have not had this problem on the same machine with Win 2000. There seems to be a drive geometry problem with certain on board IDE controllers . . .