Building a new personal system - Can I use RAID 1?

After a long time since the last system I'm starting over with a new system build.

I'm currently using Windows 2000 Professional and I may stay with that or go to XP. I'm not crazy about the installation restrictions of XP.

I'm thinking of implementing a simple 2 disk (80gb each) Raid 1 setup but I'm wondering if that's even possible unless the system disk is not a part of the raid system?

I'm also concerned about making recovery (non disk crashes) more complex than it already is.

I had a complete hard drive failure 2 years ago and paid $1500 to get the data back which I did. Never again!

I currently have two partitions on a single drive with all of my data and apps on the second partition. I guess I could have a third drive just for the op sys and do a RAID 1 with the others.

From what I can gather so far this would mean that these drives would be spinning 24/7/365. That's noisey and draws a lot of power.

Can someone suggest another solution along the following lines:

I could live with a days lost data. So if I could get an automated drive to drive copy periodically and an automated "changed" data backup daily.

I'd also be willing to have a seperate op sys disk if necessary.


Ideas ???????

Thanks Bob S.

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