About to start building a new Comp....

Im new to this, so here is my lame question..... What is RAID?

RAID is basically using two harddrives at the same time. RAID 0 is where the two hard drives act as one and seperates all data in the two harddrives. It makes everything run faster because the harddrives have to do half of the work, but if one harddrive hits the pooper you lose everything. RAID 1 is where the second hard drive acts as a mirror image. You do something on one harddrive it is written on the second one at the same time. There are other types but they wouldnt really concern you.

Consumer RAID will be 0 or 1. 0 is pointless. 1 is the slowest, but pretty reliable (I think there are 6 total - RAID 0 to RAID 5) But the higher raids are found in more expensive hardware. Also there are IDE and SCSI and Fibre raids, so depending on your wallet net worth, you can go to town on redundancy versus speed.

RAID discs are put into arrays, which can be quite a lot of drives. 2-4 is more of a consumer to web server number.

Thanks, thats what I wanted to hear. I am going to take my old HD out and install it in the new case with the new HD.

You ideally want to use the same model and size drive in a RAID... If you stick a 20gig ata 66 drive in a raid with a 120 gig ata 133 you will lose 100 gigs in space and you will slow the drive down to 66.

You are putting them in parrallel and creating the appearance of one drive. So the lesser of them is what the computer will see as the hard drive...

Yea, I have a 40 gig right now. Was goin to put another 40 in.

Here are a few of the items I am looking at....

video card
processor
motherboard
hard drive
case

everything else looks good.