CaffeineMe said
Get a Promise Controller, off Ebay and hack it. Adding a single resistor between a couple easily ID'd portions of the card , then flashing it's BIOS turns it into their more expensive RAID card. I bought a controller off Ebay a year ago for about $15, but I've never actually done the hack. Google Promise Raid Hack and see what you find.

You can get the raid card for 15 bucks if your patient with no hacking required on eBay.

And (not to the guy I quoted) why exactly do you want to run raid-1 anyway? Please please run raid-0 or no raid and backup instead. Raid-1 guards one of about 20 things you need a backup for and is essential for companies running 24/7 that can not afford downtime. IS that you? You might also be very careful concerning how many of the cards will run together in the same box. And with 5 your gonna be sharing IRQ's. And the cheap cards are basicaly software raid which uses the cpu and system resources to raid them so disk activity with 5 cards and sharing irq's etc... can seriously impact performance too.

Hopefully you need five cards for 5 seperate systems. And trust someone who has done this.... And done it also with real controllers not these toys. raid-1 saves a buisness runing 24/7 that can not afford to even go down long enough to restore from a backup or disk image but it STILL has to be backed up anyway so don't think this is a way not to backup. You may know all this but 80 percent of the folks trying to do what your asking about seem to think raid-1 allowed them to not backup and thats simply not the case.

You can image a drive and restore it in an hour probably and its a valid BACKUP that will hold the file you just deleted or screwed up by mistake. With a mirror your screwed as its gone from BOTH disks in the blink of an eye. Raid-1 is not a excuse not to backup. It saves you from only a primary disk failure. you still need to backup.

Tex