I am looking into getting a raid 0 setup. I will have identical 250gb seagate hdds. The question I have is since raid 0 doesnt have mirroring can I use Norton Ghost or some other software to create a backup hdd image on an external hdd?

Yep, that should work just fine.

cjl is right, that will work just fine. The raid0 is done by the bios on the raid controller. It then passes the raid0 drive info to the OS, but the OS only sees it as a normal drive so it will treat it the same as any other disk.

It doesn't always work out that way. as soon as your system is setup and backup I would go ahead and try to recover so you don't run into unexpected troubles later on. I essential did the same thing with acronis true image and it didn't work I had to fall back on vista ultimates imaging utility.

I should also mention that i have a 500gb WD hdd as well. Is there anyway to incorporate that into the raid like a raid 0-1 and use the 500gb as the mirror drive?