The only other thing i will add that is less relavant now that motherboards are seeming to just get spammed by sata ports is, keep your array sizes smaller than the maximum amount of free ports you have incase a controller card fails, had just that happen, all the data was there nice and safe on the drives, but only had 2 ports, and a 4 drive array, so had to hijack a friends computer to plug all the drives into and start the very long process of extracting the data to a new storage array,
To clarify, no longer sold controller card, and if you look hard enough you can find recovery software that can make sense of just about any way a raid array can be dreamed of,