Hard drive efficiency

I have learned a valuable lesson, it does not pay to go cheap in personal computing.
In the business world as an IT Professional you are forced to buy cheap by your CFO and you get into the habbit of reading bi-lines where you get into the habit of "hey this does the same thing as the more expensive product, let's get this and make the boss happy" mentality.
Having said that to save you all time from mocking me for my decision...  

I have some questions for the knowledgable community at large...
I have never dealt with raid in a personal scenario before so I wanted your opinions please.
I'm used to using hardware raid with expensive raid cards and scsi drives so software raid is totally different.

Here's my scenario.... Unfortunately I made the decision to buy a mobo that doesn't have the best SATA II drives and according to the reviews I've read the JMicron SataII drivers don't always allow the full transfer speed between drive to drive internally or e-sata to internal sata.

I don't care about getting the maximum transfer speed, (if there's one thing I've learned in the IT world OEM ratings and the real world are typically far apart) I would just like to get transfer speeds faster than 13-20mbps with a SATA II hard-drive.  

So having said all that... Would it be worthwhile to get 3 more hard drives and run raid 10 so that with striping my read/write speads will be faster ( I want to go raid sooner or later anyway because I want to try it in software on a personal pc someday...) or would I just be better off biting the bullet and going with a better mobo as far as sata drivers that actually function the way they are supposed to and run raid later?

Thanks for any suggestions in advance...
Thank you.
B