IBM Desktar : "A disk read error occurred" & RAID solutions to choose

Hello,

My 40 Go IBM Desktar gave up 5 months after the warranty. It was my Windows
bootable master HD, now it displays the following message :

Quote :
"Searching for Boot Record from IDE-0..OK

A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

I tried a few things as indicated in this message
(http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/11890/) but couldn't solve
the problem. I downloaded Drive Fitness Test (DFT) from IBM/Hitachi and get
the following result after an Advanced Test :

Quote :
"One or more corrupted sectors found"

So the HD is recognized by the BIOS and DFT but it seems some, if not all,
sectors are corrupted. I wonder how I can fix it. I was able to start
Windows using an other HD but the IBM HD makes Windows to freeze some time
to time, I wasn't able to view my devices from Explorer for example, or I
would have to wait for hours...

Small things but I checked the HD and found out that one "leg" of the IBM
IDE connecter is smaller that the others. It's the top-right one, near the
jumpers. Is it normal ? I thought it might make the HD not to work properly
when it comes to read/write access but make it perfectly detected by the
BIOS... Is it possible ?

In the future I would like to avoid all these problems because I already had
3-4 times these problems. I now backup my data using Cobian Backup but would
like to install a RAID solution. What RAID-n should I use ? RAID-1 ? I read
an article about it but it didn't really help me to choose a solution. The
perfect solution would allow me to continue working even if a HD is damaged,
I would only have to reboot, change the HD... and that's all. No data would
be lost and I would only waste 5 minutes to reinstall the HD. No backup
restoration process needed, nor having to check "what the hell" happened to
the HD.

Thanks in advance for your help,
JM