Storage upgrade - RAID advice

[serenity]

So in my seemingly ongoing gaming rig upgrade, I've decided to upgrade my HDDs next...

Right now I have a RAID 0 setup for my OS and 2 single 250gb drives for storage.

I just realized though, I don't have any redundancy running in RAID 0 (which is fine for an OS drive) but my storage also does not have this...

I'm a little stuck on how to configure RAID though...
I don't have a lot of money to burn so I was going to get another 250gb drive and set up RAID 5 for my storage and then upgrade my 3x80gb RAID 0 config...

Although then I thought, if I have 6 drives, would combining all the drives in to RAID 1+0/0+1 or RAID 50 be better? Then I'd get redundancy and the speed of RAID 0...

Also, kind of a side question... do number of drives matter for RAID 0? is 3 significantly faster than 2?

I'm looking for maximum capacity/performance/reliability at minimal cost (aren't we all )
I'm running software (motherboard) RAID if you're wondering...

[b1lk1]

Running motherboard/software RAID for anything more than simple RAID arrays (0 or 1) will cause alot of CU overhead. IF you are going to spend the time to get this setup do yourself a favor and invest in a real hardware RAID PCI-E/PCI card. The real problem with motherboard RAID is that it is unreliable and if you get a new motherboard you are stuck getting one that has the same chipsets to keep your arrays. I would strongly advies against it.