motherboard raid 5 question

[random betrayal]

I currently have my motherboard setup doing raid 1 for my data drive(My OS is on a separate raptor). I plan on adding another hard drive and rebuilding the data into a raid 5.

I have read the many arguments about raid 5 on the motherboard but I can not afford a couple hundred dollar card at the moment.

I have all drives on the computer backed up daily by the windows home server. So I am thinking that I might be able to slide with the motherboards raid 5 knowing I can rebuild it anything were to happen like the motherboard crapping out.

What is everyone's thoughts? Am I playing with fire or is my calculation of risk within means?

 

[mooseracing]

You can get a Perc 5 for under 200 dollars.

If you are backing the array up daily, I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[RebateMonger]

Since you have good backups, if you want to use the full capacity of the drives, you might consider dropping redundant RAID completely and using Volume Mount Points instead. As long as you can work around the question of locating appropriate mount points for the volumes, this will allow you to expand your data drive at will, using any size drive,. Recovery is just a matter of replacing a failed drive with a new drive and copying the failed drive's files back onto the new drive.

 

[Yellowbeard]

And, unless you need hot swap, RAID-5 is probably a bit overkill. Do you have enough drives to RAID 0+1?

 

[random betrayal]

interesting idea with the mount points, I will have to look into that a little more and it is new to me.
Thanks for the suggestion