Newbie Question about RAID

[vert310]

Hi,

I'm trying to setup my build now and was wondering if RAID is for me. I do a lot of torrenting and I rip/encode video files. I was wondering if RAID would be good for me or if keeping drives separate would work better? I would think that it would be better to keep separate drives because I feel if you keep the encoding and downloading on one drive and keep the OS and apps on another, the system would run better. I know that RAID 0 is faster but, would it help in multitasking? I've been trying to google for an answer and have not come up with anything definitive. Mostly likely, I will be working with 2-3 500gb, possibly more in future (I download a crap load) sata drives as it seems the best $/gb. Any advice would be great. Thanks.

 

[cpburns]

i have 7 hard drives inside my computer. 4x 100GB, 200GB, 250GB 160GB. 3x 100GB are in raid0, the rest are singles.

i boot off the free 100GB
games, swap file, temp space on the 300GB raid0
movie iso's on the 200GB
all other media on the 250GB
bittorrent and iso's to the 160GB

so i believe splitting your disks has a good use. i also like raid for performance purposes. i'm almost always first into games. my swap isn't terrible performancewise, no worse than a single drive.