Recovering formatted data is a nightmare

This is a long story. at least, it was for me. It all started when i tried to install some special half-life 2 drivers using the beta 4.12 catalysts. I used driver cleaners to clean out my previous 4.11 drivers, restarted, and then installed the new drivers. (i found them from a link on the forums here, but i cant remember their name) anyway, so i restarted again after the install, and was welcomed not with the normal windows welcome screen, but by nothing. my monitor had gone into standby, signalling that my video card had stopped outputting. i restarted again, got the same thing. on a third restart, (i didnt like this one bit) it told me the windows sytem file was corrupt, and it would no longer run windows. "aww %#@" i said to myself, and promptly stuck in the windows install cd. i wanted to install a new installation of windows over the old one. well, windows didnt like that idea, and insisted that my harddrive be formatted before it would let me install windows on it. I didnt want to do that. i had an 80gb harddrive pretty much full of files i didnt want to lose. I pondered this for a while, and decided to install windows on my other harddrive. a tiny 15gb drive i used for videos. i could afford to lose them, they were replaceable and certainly not vital to my work or hobbies. so, i selected that drive for installation of windows. it told me i'd need to format it, i said ok, and it did. however, it formatted my other drive. not the one i'd told it to install windows on. i screamed. now i had a drive that not only had a broken os on it, it had a broken file structure. would i ever be able to recover it? i immediately got onto my friends computer and started researching how to do data recovery. i looked at a bunch of programs, very expensive ones, not so expensive ones, ones that ran in dos, ones that didnt, and of course i looked around for recommendations. on the forums, spinrite came recommended. I downloaded a demo version of it and ran it to see what it could find. it found nothing. i flipped. then, i looked at other programs. i ran them, they also found nothing. I bought another harddrive (one identical to my other 80gb drive) and installed windows on it, with the other drives unplugged from my machine. i downloaded some programs that worked in windows and did file recovery, and was much more successful with them. they found some stuff, but the first one i tried didnt find any files. now, finding my folders is all nice, but they arent too useful without the files in them. so, my search continued. I think you get the point. i looked for a long time, and used almost every program available. Eventually i found one called "getdataback" that did indeed do just that. it gave me five alternative file structures, and i picked wrong several times before finding the one that worked, and it found almost all of my files. not all of them, however. some of my biggest files showed up as having zero size. thats alright, i didnt lose anything crucial, such as the pictures i'd taken with my digital camera or my music library. The process took 2 weeks of nightmares and worry.

now i've decided that backing up my files could save me a lot of trouble in the future. I want to set up a RAID array with my two 80gb drives. my abit nf7 doesnt support raid, so i need a pci raid solution. i have two questions. a, will i recieve a huge performance penalty from doing this? and b, what pci raid card will be the best? i suppose there's a question c. what array should i use? (the object here is redundancy) 0,1,0+1? due to a shipping error, i have 3 80gb harddrives. can i have 160gb of space and have that protected against harddrive failure with this equipment?

Thanks a lot for your advice and for reading through.
Nikita Chrystephan, aka zippykid9, screwball8