well back when cd writers were 200+ dollors I ran a plain cdrom just to save wear and tear off the writer... now they're so cheap who cares.
Now I must ask you why in gods name do you need 5 hard drives? please tell me something that makes sence and not "I got a good deal on a bunch of 10 gig hard drives". With hd's with 400+ gigs whats the point of this?