Aaron C. de Bruyn wrote:

Ok--I got moved in to my new place and am back and running on the 'net.
I sat down for a few hours and attempted to write a script to try all
possible combinations of drives...but I have to admit that I'm lost.

I have 8 drives in the array--and I can output every possible
combination of those.  But what the heck would be the logic to output
all combinations of the 8 drives using only 6 at a time?  My head hurts.

You want only 5 at a time, don't you?
8 drives - 1 spare - 2 parity = 5

Anyway, a very quick-n-dirty way to get what you want is to:
1. calculate all permutations
2. strip away the last items of each permutation
3. get rid of duplicate lines

$ wget http://hayne.net/MacDev/Perl/permutations
$ perl permutations a b c d e f g h | cut -d' ' -f-5 | sort -u

The Perl script above is from:
http://hayne.net/MacDev/Perl/

-Corey