Question on RAID with my current build

[Nargifsma]

Well I have decided to rebuild my compy and will be getting the final piece in come thursday this week. My build is as follows:

Mobo: Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
Processor: Athlon FX 55
Memory: CORSAIR Twinx2048-3200c2 2 gigs
Video Card: Asus EN7900GTX 512MB PCI-E
Sound Card: SB Audigy 2 X-Gamer (going to buy an X-FI soon)
Speakers: Logitech Z5500 5.1
Monitor: NEC MultiSync FE2111SB 21 Inch
Hard drive Primary: Maxtor Diamond Max 10 250 GB ATA
Hard drives Secondary: 2 x WD Raptor 75 GB SATA

This is by no means a wimpy build, but I have never ran a RAID setup before and planned on doing so with this build (ever searching for more horsepower, heh). I just don't know if RAID is going to benefit me any. If so should I run RAID 1, 0, or 1+0 (or 0+1)? The only thing that is going to be on the Raptors is game installs I hear of RAID having data loss issues while it will only be game data this is somewhat of a concern. From what I have gathered the 1+0 (0+1) array is better to protect from data loss and still have a performance boost, is this true? I know that if one of the hard drives fails you are boned, but I have yet to actually run a HD into the ground so that's not really an issue to me. Also I have been running this Maxtor 250GB in my machine for about a year and had to Partition it into "2" drives, even in doing that it is reading it as 233 GB total, does anyone have any answers to fix this issue? Those are my main questions if you guys can come up with some solutions within the next few days it would be much obliged.

Thanks,
Nargifsma

 

[simplyput]

Although putting 2 HDs in RAID 0 does double the chances of a drive killing all your data... it rarely happens. and being that you have a back up drive running RAID 1 with the others, you should be fine even if one does break. I'm like you, yet to run a drive into the ground, I usually end up replacing them well before they reach their life expectancy.

The only thing I would do differently is switch the RAID 0 raptors to your primary drive. You want to be loading/booting off of the fast raptors, not the slower 250GB.