Quote Originally Posted by dav2900
Sometimes I think the safety of RAID-5 isn't worth all the problems in reading the drive in these types of situations; it adds another level of complexity.
I agree with you there. Raid-5 is good for dealing with an actual drive failure (which does happen). And if it isn't adding too much software overhead then it can help improve disk performance. But given Windows XP's pretty bad track record of having disks that are suddenly unreadable by XP (I had once happen myself and I saw a friend's system do this just this week, although Knoppix was able to read much but not all of the data and copy it to a USB flash drive, in addition to the many times I see reports of the same thing happening here), you only invite additional problems by running an disk system that depends on special Windows drivers.

RAID is not a replacement for regular and complete backups. Hardware failures can and have taken out multiple drives. Virusus and other malware can destroy the information on a RAID array just as well as they can on a regular hard drive. And XP may well be the unsafest OS of any for hard disks, at least until Vista comes out.