Actually, and I used to say the same thing, you DO get a speed boost using SSDs in RAID 0, so if you have the money, go for it.
RAID 5 and large external drives aren't foolproof for backup, but I agree that going with RAID 5 would be a bad idea. Speaking from experience here, RAID 5 is just a little too much overhead for a home user. Save some dough and buy 4 matched drives and put them into RAID10 if the board supports it. My old RAID5 setup used to only muster 70-90MB/sec transfers (both read and write) and now with RAID 10, I hit 120 MB/sec easily and sustain 90MB for the rest. Plus RAID10 is more failure resistant than RAID5 is.
I also hesitate to see someone buying an LGA 1366 motherboard and CPU. You can get an 1155 board and a SandyBridge based i7 for less, and it'll perform way better than the old 1366 chips. Also first hand experience on this. Not to mention, the i7 2600's overclock like a sumbish.