Maximum PC

I am currently looking at migrating from 6 small capacity Sata drives to some kind of redundant storage solution. multiple RAID1's seems the easiest, but I've had one large RAID 5 on my mind for awhile. The problem is when I think RAID 5 (or almost any RAID for that matter) I think about the problems migrating it to new motherboards/etc. The way I see it there are the following options:

Buying a card - to expensive for hardware XOR etc. I wont spend $100+ on a RAID card I might have to buy another of for migrating/replacement. This option seems possible if I just need more SATA ports for a software driven RAID.

Mobo built in driver based raid - locked into that chipset lineups compatibility, but should work in windows/linux no?

Windows based raid - purely software driven, but should be transportable to any windows installation I'm likely to consider. Kill Linux support I think though.

I'm considering dual booting to Linux in the near future, or at least on another computer and having windows shares from my main computer available. No I dont want to deal with FTP etc for basic file sharing on my home network. This presents the problem of reading/writing to the RAID from linux on both a recognizing the RAID level and a filesystem level (NTFS write support is still not done in linux IIRC)

Right now I'm thinking since I'll probably stick with Intel for the foreseeable future it would make sense to build a 4 disc RAID 5 for raw storage with the ICH RAID functionality. That should be recognizable in Linux right? Which just leaves the file system. As long as I can make files larger than 12 GB I'm happy since blue ray rips are the biggest thing that should be on there. Unfortunately that kind of rules out FAT32. Does anyone know if there's any hacked support in windows xp/vista/7 for file systems such as ext2/3 etc?

Or is Linux NTFS support mature enough to trust at least reading from it and hopefully writing to it too? Has that one man project stalled out and dropped off the face of the earth or are NTFS volumes something most Linux users deal with frequently now?

I'm just not willing to shell out more than $100 for an external solution.

I don't know about the one man project?

But NTFS support has been pretty awesome for a few years now. I trust reading from and writing to it for sure.

A hardware RAID solution that is formatted with NTFS is what I would lean towards. I haven't done it, or researched it much... but I'd think you could do it.

Software RAID, forget it.