hey, ive heard alot about Raid and im not 100% sure what it does. is it kinda like dule banking RAM. so if i Raid 2x 80gig (matching)the hard drives work together? but i would still have 160gig?
,ok... so does its use both hard drive space up? IE 2x80gig you would only have 80gig instead of 160?
depends what raid: raid 0 = 160gig stripe (well 150gig cause the raid overhead is larger than ntfs) raid 1 = 80gig mirror (data goes identically on 2 disks)
There are other raid types that *may* suit your need more, however not many of these are supported by an on motherboard controller. Raid 0 is fast, but if 1 of the drives dies, you loose data on both, so this doubles the failure rate effectively. Raid 1 is more secure (ie if 1 drive fails you can still re-construct the array) but you loose 1/2 the storage.
Raid-0 is nice and quick I use it for my system boot disk and ripping disk but all my "work" is kept on a normal disk as raid-0 doubles your chance of dataloss due to hardware failure. If I was a bit richer I would be tempted to go for Raid0+1 or Raid-10 (mirrored and striped) like I do at work... A pair of raid-0 "120G, 7200rpm, sata, 8M cache" are nice and quick for booting and give me 226Gig formatted. for less than a single 250G that would be slower (they don't do Raptors that big yet...)
All you could ever possibly want to know about RAID: http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/
