benn - I'm aching to say it, but I cant
lol.
That would just be mean!
I said it at the beginning and I'm just gonna say it again - I think you're trying to way over think and overdo the whole thing.
1. Why does the backup need to be raided? What's wrong with just using them as seperate drives? Dont say that being limited to 300Gb transfers per time is too big a hassle - even on a blazing machine you're still talking about a large transfer time just for that.
If you have it all backed up to a seperate drive just either do Raid properly or scrap it all together and just do them as seperate drives - you dont loose anything.
1 300Gb drive in your system goes to 1 300Gb backup drive - easy peasy!
You're saying you cant afford to do it properly, yet you can afford to fork out all this cash to buy the drives to store who knows what?
What format are you ripping all your stuff to? Have you considered just ripping it to something smaller, especially at the rate you're increasing your collection - you're going to be expanding ridiculasly fast.
Also, for something that big a project, I'd say you're just shooting yourself in the foot. Spending all the time and money and hassle to set all this up with hacks and work arounds.
HACKING xp to allow SOFTWARE RAID of USB Drives is just too many hacks together.
You're already seeing problems and you've barely got going.
For a project that big you really want a dedicated file server running Raid 5 using backup tapes and a backup job to safely back it all up.
You say it'll cost you more but it wont because all of a sudden you get twice the storage capacity as you aren't wasting half your drives on backup and you dont need to buy two 300Gb hard drives every time you want 300Gb more space.