I had the same thing happen to myself several months ago. Got the same error but it was from Win2k. And it did the same thing. I was ready to plunk down $1000 to recover all the data. I had 10 years worth of data stored on that drive. Luckily, the only thing that was lost, after I recovered everything else, was the capture of my wedding video (I had the original tape) and some honeymoon photos that were stored on another computer.
With the 3 drives, you'll definitely want to either go with a RAID 1 with a hotspare or a RAID 5. I'd suggest a RAID 1 so that when one drive dies the spare takes over immediately. Then you can get a replacement drive without having to worry about losing another drive. If you do RAID 5 and lose a drive and aren't able to get it replaced before the next one dies, you're screwed.
In a nutshell, consider how much this project is worth to you and how you felt when everything was lost. If you don't want to feel that way again, get the multiple drives. Oh, and be sure to get a nice huge external drive for backups. Redundancy is never a bad thing
