Note that if you're using cheap, big consumer quality disks and RAID 5, if you lose one you're likely to lose the whole array because at least one of the other disks will have unrecoverable read errors during the rebuild. RAID 6 helps, but the math is still frightening.

Granted, I haven't looked for years at what's been done to address this, but based on the state of the art back then I'd only try this with ZFS, which checksums everything it puts to disk, which among other things catches the incredible screw case of the very complicated firmware writing the right data correctly to the wrong location on the disk (!).