Possible to do RAID 5 via 3 identical, external USB drives?

Is it technically possible to design the system I originally asked about?  Could the potential data corruption problem, in theory, be fixed, perhaps at the expense of speed?

I should make clearer my original question.  If you are somebody who has accumulated a bunch of WD RAID-oriented, identical drives, but you have 3 different cases, each of which turns the identical, internal drive into an external USB drive, is it possible to plug each of these drives into a single Windows XP Pro machine and make Windows treat the three drives as, ideally a RAID 5 array, but at least a RAID 1 (mirrored) array.   Is there no hardware or software way to do this?

Can it be done, in practice?

Can it be done, in theory?

Um, RobWill:

XP or motherboards that run XP nicely will let you plug in two identical drives, and it will treat them as a RAID 0 or 1 array, if you set it up that way, I believe in Disk Management.

By "RAID-oriented" I mean that I was warned on other threads or articles that a problem with RAID is that there will be something like a small delay in writing to one of the drives, for whatever reason, and the RAID controller will immediately conclude that the drive has been compromised.  The controller will then immediately begin trying to rebuild that entire drive's data, or it will stop writing to that drive.  Or something like that.  Some drives, such as (some of?) those that Western Digital tout as "Enterprise," have some sort of setting that prevents that from happening.

Any further comments or advice, anybody?

Thanks for the comments I've gotten so far.

RobWill:

I'm tempted to give you all the points for this question.  I won't, because I thank you all, in varying degrees, for the education you've provided me.

THE PC IN QUESTION IS A DELL XPS 720.  CAN RobWill OR ANYBODY EXPAND ON RobWill's ANSWER?

Again, thanks all.

RobWill:

You said, "...one feature I do not like with these mirrors [meaning RAID 1 setups controlled by the PC's
 BIOS] is the only way you know if the mirror fails is a brief 'degraded' message at boot. There is no warning within XP such as the event logs. A few do offer monitoring software."

Sounds like a good solution to me, so long as the monitoring software is both good and cheap.

To all:

Why would somebody want to create a RAID array out of a bunch of non-identical, external, USB hard drives?  Because there are tons of these drives around.  The price of the drives will fall, and so you'll be able to pick them up, on eBay for example, for dirt cheap.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a gizmo with a bunch of USB connectors, and this gizmo allows you to add instant (more or less) storage space whenever you choose?

Incidentally, just because the device I envision looks more or less like a USB hub, does not mean that it's circuitry need resemble a USB hub at all.

Can this be done, in theory?

Thanks to everybody for your replies.

I think you will find XP pro only supports spanned or striped (Raid 0) volumes, and not Mirrored (Raid 1), or Raid 5 configurations.

also, until USB 3.0 comes out, eSATA is at least 3 times faster.

External drives connected by USB, a hacked O/S, and no support. That would be a fault tolerant system ;-)

For the record VXDguy, EE does not condone hacks or O/S license violations.
https://www.experts-exchange.com/help.jsp#hi16

I just did the request attention link and asked EE to remove the URL in the comment.  I wouldn't want to contribue to the deliquency of an EE customer :)

I reported that hack/link to Microsoft several months ago and they haven't had it taken down. I guess they're not too concerned since it's only home PCs that it's going to be done on and a servicepack could even update the file and kill the array permanently. Perhaps I should have reported it to Symantec since it's Veritas' technology that it's using.

Uh, I kinda lost you guys at the end, there, but it's been a really interesting discussion.  I think I'll award points now.  Thanks to all.

Thanks mrmoderate.
Cheers !
--Rob