After days of searching and researching, I have come to the conclusion that RAID5 is not heavily used in the consumer space. There are very few responses to most RAID based questions on this forum and in many others.
Going with hardware based RAID, on the surface felt like the best idea, but the requirement of vendor supplied drivers made me concerned about the manufacture dropping support of a specific card, and that the current driver may not work with future versions of the operating system. Which would leave me in an ultimately unsupported configuration.
Software raid has similar challenges as well. That, and I just don't trust software raid.
I worked in the technology hosting environment and my mindset had always been driven by what we did there. Stepping back, I looked at what I was trying to protect in my data. Most of the storage would have been media files, that I can recreate if I wanted (music and movies that I have the media for). The exception would be pictures or personal videos. So, instead of using RAID for data protection of things I could recreate, I decided to just backup the files I could not recreate. I will use an external USB drive for items that can't be reproduce and connect that occasionally to make a new backup. When not connected, I will store it in a fire proof safe. That will provide security for data corruption, hardware failure and accidental deletion (because it is not connected) as well as fire, theft or some other bad thing.
Also, I can buy a large backup USB drive(s) for less than I would spend on a quality hardware raid controller.
It took a long-time to switch my mindset away from RAID, but that is the route that I am going. I had wanted RAID5 for speed, redundancy and least lost space caused by RAID.
I am posting so others can see one person's logic. It may not apply to everyone, but it will work for me.
