My 1.5 TB harddrive just blew after about 4 months... a few days after
filling it too.... Thanks Seagate! [Seagate Barracuda (ST31500341AS)
7200.11 SATA 3.0Gb/s 1.5TB] ... It's my own damn fault for going for
the best gig/$ deal I guess... and backing up that much stuff was not
an option financially... I always expected it to fail but I had hoped
it would last a year or two at least, by then I could update to raid 1
or buy a 3tb drive or something...

Anyways.... this piece of crap is still under warranty, and they will
send me another piece of crap to replace it... but I really don't want
to go through this again, I will never trust this brand now that I've
been assraped... I'm thinking the only way I can use the new piece of
crap their going to send me is if it is in a RAID configuration of
some sort.... RAID 5 looks nice but I'm sooooo not ready to fork out
another $300ish for two more 1.5 TB drives

What are my options - with redundancy and scalability in mind? Can I
just start out with some kind of 2 disk mirroring configuration and
then later add the third disk (converting to raid 5 here) and the
fourth and fifth in the furture? I guess I'm asking if you can convert
go from a two disk x 1.5 TB raid 1 setup to a three disk x 1.5 TB raid
5 setup without reformatting...

....my brain hurts, thanks Seagate

Suggestions welcomed