Well, what do you expect for free?
Seriously, you have done exactly the right thing. Using a hardware raid card is the best idea.
It may seem ludicrous now, but rewind two or three years and 1TB would seem like a massive amount so lets give OpenE credit for an iSCSI 1TB target.
The best idea is to use hardware raid anyway, software raid cards are such a PITA, I've had so many of them suddenly decide to drop their config and present two drives from a raid1 config <sigh>.
Your point is valid RE: 758GB, but I guess OpenE need to draw the line somewhere...no sense in giving away the farm. 1TB Raw capacity is really enough to demonstrate the commercial viability of the product? If you want to save money, go for OpenFiler, but if you want a solid product OpenE is a good choice.
Hot spares are really only useful if you have multiple raids, otherwise Raid6 (or 5E) is a better idea, why have a drive sitting idle :-) The Adaptec 5805 is my current favourite...
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