This was very badly finished imo so I need to make this clear for anyone who reads this in future.
3 Things to know about RAID:
RAID CANNOT be used by all Mobos so don't assume you can use it, check before you even consider it.
RAID 0 - The 2 Drives will combine to make on larger drive, i.e. 500GB x 2 = 1TB, The advantage is double read speed, write speed and cache, the disadvantage is, as said, if one drive fails your data is lost
RAID 1 - Mirroring is a totally different beast, if you have 500GB x2 you only get 500GB of storage but everything is saved twice, the obvious advantage is that if one drivve fails then you lose nothing but one hard drive, the disadvantage is half storage and cache, read and write speed isnt affected as far as I know
Identical HDDs are adviced but apparantly not compulsory