...for a rebuilding of the current office into more of a production studio, not a hidey hole. The rendergarden is getting ready to get moved into a rack over the next several months (the old pay as you go idea). I decided, instead of upgrading my current main box, to build a new one dedicated to CG and video apps, keeping my current mainbox for gaming, and a secondary purpose of audio work.

The new graphics box is being built around a Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P motherboard, hosting 8 gigs of DDR2 and one of the new 65watt Phenom II's. And a nice little Geforce 9500GT dual head video card and a 700 watt Green power supply. On the list to get still is a suitable case, and a good blu-ray burner.

My problem is deciding on what kind of hard drive configuration I want. The motherboard supports RAID 0,1,5,10, and JBOD (I have 8 SATA ports to play with, in addition to the old IDE port). Data backup is going to be, for the immediate future, dumping onto an external USB drive. I know data striping(RAID 0) increases your bandwidth, while mirroring keeps you safe from one drive failure. And RAID 5 has fault tolerance, etc. What I'd like is some real world feedback on advantages vs disadvantages....keeping in mind the idea is to not be terrified every second of losing completed work to a head crash. This box is going to be running Modo, Vue Infinite 7.5-64, Poser Pro/Poser8, Matchmover 4HD, Particle Illusion, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects Pro (hopefully the CS4 versions early next year), Photoshop, and all the other little goodies like gridmodeller, Mimic and DS3, Texture converter 2, etc.

Any suggestions?

This question will just show my ignorance. You seem to be building a real dream setup :)
But for the hard drives- why not get a HD tower?  8 or 10 500 gig HD's, what ever.
At least 2 terabytes worth..
You could max out windows and have an internal raid sys.

Mainly $$$$....... What I think you are talking about is a SCSI array...and those can get expensive. If I were going pro with this, I'd do it in a heartbeat...but that is a little too 'pro' for the budget (but oh, the geek points).

Don't use the mainboard RAID. We're talking an nVidia chipset here, and the nVidia southbridge is not built to withstand the rigors of intensive disk controlling.

This is from personal experience. I burned out 3 nVidia soutbridges within 2 weeks just by trying to transfer 30 GB of data over a Gbit network to a RAID 1 disk setup on those mainboards.

In my experience, Intel southbridges don't get as hot as nVidia southbridges, but they also perform slower.

If you want to use RAID, your best option is to buy a dedicated PCI Express RAID controller, preferably one designed for servers. Those controllers are significantly faster than the mainboard solutions and won't burn out on you.

If you want both speed and redundancy, you're probably best off using RAID 0+1 over 4 identical disks. I recommend Samsung Spinpoint T1 drives (7200 RPM, 32 MB cache, 1 terabyte), connected to that dedicated RAID controller.
RAID 0+1 (formally, just RAID 1) will set up a mirrored stripe set, giving you about 180% of the bandwith of a single drive (but access times will remain the same) plus full data redundancy. It'll perform better than RAID5 for both reads and writes.
There is some extra cost: you have to have 4 identical drives as opposed to 3 identical drives for RAID 5, but at the current price level of hard disks the cost is not prohibitive. You should be able to get a Spinpoint T1 for less than $100.

If you have the budget, you could also throw in a Velociraptor for your OS.