Which RAID array to use? How many drives to buy?

I recently received an invite to a private HD torrent tracker which is doing a number on my HD space. I want at least a terabyte of space and a RAID that can tolerate the failure of 1 drive. I'm willing to buy from 3 to 5 drives. It would be this drive or something similar. Any suggestions? http//forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=552006[]http//forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=552006

IMO Maxtor quality has really gone downhill in recent years, coincidentally around the time Seagate bought them (I'm no Seagate fan either). I used to buy a lot of Maxtor drives, but no longer. Personally I prefer Western Digital and Hitachi. You can get a WD 500GB w/ 16MB cache for $104 shipped from ZipZoomFly. Much better choice, IMO.

http//www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101259

You can do RAID 5 with 3 drives, that will give you two striped drives and a parity drive. So three 500GB drives will get you 1TB of fault-tolerant space. 5 drives might be a problem for your system depending on your mobo, case, power supply, and cooling situation.