Advice appreciated on Hardware RAID controller

[FatalSaviour]

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

[arthurleung]

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.