Is this a personal machine or just a render machine?
In other words will you be doing other stuff than bryceing on this machine or just renders?

Dual booting could give you a clean render environment and you can go back to doing your regular stuff in the other OS. Have to maintain 2 OSes though.

Incarnadine is right but if you are going to be having problems with running out of disk space, RAID might be too expensive. You might be better off by making a disk image once everything is installed and a disk image of a windows install. If things go south, you can use the disk image and return. Can also back up your work. Have to do that anyway Raid or not.
Later on you could buy an external drive and use that for backup.

Sometimes when hard drives fail and the first partition is just OS, you can still get the data off ot the other partitions and sometimes the drive is a new paperweight.