Ok, so I just bought 3x 2TB WD Elements external USB 2 drives which I want to use as my main home file archive. Currently my archive consists of 2x 1TB drives where one of them is mounted in an empty folder on the other one. This works OK, but sometimes makes it difficult to organize data.

Disk O: holds DataType1, DataType2 and DataType3, Disk P: holds DataType4. Like this:

O:\DataType[1-3]\
O:\DataType4\ -> P:\

The problem with that is that I can only have 1TB of DataType4 and 1TB of the others combined. If I want 1.2TB DataType4, I need to store 200GB on O:, breaking the directory structure/organization. There's also another problem, there's no redundancy (one disk making bad noises which is why I want to replace them).

So I figured I'd just place my new drives in a software raid5 array, getting a single volume with redundancy and twice the space I have today. Turns out Vista doesn't support software raid5 (I just assumed Striped volumes meant that). My windows 7 system has a 'Create Raid 5' option in the computer management console, but googling suggests it's not supported?

So should I..

1. Create 3 separate volumes connected through mount-points or symlinks (whatever the windows term is for it)?
   
2. Create a spanned volume?
   
3. Create a striped volume?
   
4. Connect them to my FreeBSD server, use ZFS/RAID-Z and make available using samba?
   

My usage scenarios will be backups, overall file archive/dump and some disk-intensive computations.