Advice appreciated on Hardware RAID controller

Basically, I'm just considering whether this would be worth it?
I'm currently using the onboard RAID on my A8N32SLI-Deluxe MB, (so NForce 4). However, my RAID 5 corrupted recently, and although it seems likely that I'll be able to recover about 99% of my data using RAID Reconstructor or R-Studio, I'm a little concerned that this RAID solution isn't really ideal.

Therefore, I've switched from the 3x250GBs that I was using in RAID5, to 2x500GBs in RAID1. I'm still not particularly enamoured with Nvidia's RAID solution, so was considering taking the plunge and buying a hardware RAID controller.

I'm also considering adopting Nehalem fairly early on, so it would help if I could simply migrate the RAID array across?

My questions then are as follows:

• Will this bring me better performance? RAID 1 writes seem quite slow (more of a performance hit than I would have expected) at the moment, either in RAID1 or RAID5? Do controllers with dedicated RAM still exist/help a lot?
• Will this prove more reliable?
• Is it really worth it?

Thanks for all your input everyone,

Best Regards

Nope, you can't migrate Nvidia RAID (may be possible with another Nvidia chipset but not always, particularly if it is different generation)

Performance:
3 Disks = No difference
4 Disks = a small bit improvement depends on how much is your controller
6+ Disks = a hell lot of improvement (the card will also cost a hell lot too)

If you are planning to do any overclocking, hardware RAID will be more reliable (also depends on how "hardware" is your hardware RAID card). And personally I think motherboard RAID will not be reliable past 4 drives.

Software RAID1 is probably the most reliable and cheapest way for data redunduncy. Unless you're using the biggest drives possible (e.g. 1.5TB x4 or more) it is rarely worth buying a hardware RAID controller. RAID1 always come out cheaper and have better protection.