Setting up RAID, what is best for me?

[breebreebran31]

At my school there's this warehouse with all kinds of old unused computers. So I asked my dean if I could take some of the HDD's and he let me take 5 80GB HDD's. I was going to sell them, but then I thought I could just use them on my own build.
All I would use it for is storage. Music, videos, pictures.
Would a RAID0 suffice?
But I've been reading about raids and every article says you need backups. Do raids have a higher failure rate?
I've never had a hard drive fail on me so I've never seen the need for a backup. It's risky I know, but it doesn't bother me since I've never even seen signs of HDD failure.

 

[OhSnapWord]

It's not a matter of IF a hard drive will fail, it's WHEN.

The reason a RAID array has a higher failure rate is because there are more points of failure. Because of this, a RAID0 with 5 drives would be about 5x more likely to fail than a single disk.

It would also be roughly 5x faster than a single disk.