I'm thinking of setting up a small RAID 5 config in my new PC.

A workable alternative to a RAID system (at least, it works for me, but most likely is not what you want) is to have two hard drives: master and secondary.

I use Powerquest's Drive Image to copy the primary drive to the secondary drive whenever the mood hits me (takes about 25 minutes) and I then have a perfect copy that is bootable. If the primary drive fails, just change the bootup sequence in the BIOS and use the secondary until you can buy a new primary drive.

Advantages: Simple, inexpensive, gives you the opportunity to recover from mistakes ("Ooops-- I didn't really mean to delete that file") and highly redundant.

Disadvantages: You have to remember to do the backups occasionally; in the event of a failure, chances are the backup will not be absolutely current.

Like I said... it works for me.

tanstaafl.