RAID Controller Failure

I recently had a drive in 2 drive RAID 0 die and take all 700 GB of data with it. I am considering rebuilding my machine and adding 1 or 2 drives to do either RAID 5 or RAID 0+1, or possibly just mirror the volumes independently.

I have a BFG 680i motherboard that uses the Mediashield software. I am reading in some places that if the RAID controller (in this case the mother board) dies, the data is lost even if the stripe data isn't damaged.

I'm trying to discover the veracity of this before I rebuild my machine. I'd rather not have two mirrored volumes as that will be an irritation, but I don't want to go through the hassle of totally reconstructing my data again. The security of RAID 5 or RAID 0+1 would be enough if I knew I wouldn't be hosed if the motherboard croked. ((Yes, I know RAID != backup)) but backing up 700 Gigs ain't cheap.

Anyone know for sure or have experienced this scenario?

Thanks, I guess $99.00 is a small price to pay if it works. Of course, if I had a spare 700 Gigs to back up to I wouldn't be in this predicament to begin with.

Without reading ALL drives in a RAID0 array, data recovery is physically impossible. If it was just a simple array corruption (all drives still readable) then data recovery is much simpler (where free methods are available).

RAID5 on the other hand is mostly proprietary stuff, especially nVidia's host/driver RAID5 implantation. I doubt any RAID recovery software can read it. Softwares that claim to able recover data from a RAID5 array usually only works with big brand hardware RAID cards.

In any case going with RAID5 on an nVidia chipset is an extremely bad idea. It's a dead end.