New to raid, need help

I don't see why not.

But... What kind of raid are you considering, and what do you want to accomplish with it?

2 hdds in raid 0 for the os, the rest as normal drives with games, films ect
for this would i need a second controller? or can windows 7 see the none raid disks left on the controller

Windows-7 sees what the motherboard and bios sees. What motherboard do you have? I think they all will allow you to have both raid and non-raid devices attached.

But... Raid-0 is not very effective for the OS. The OS does lots of small random reads and writes. Raid-0 allows two drives to do sequential processing of large files well. You might want to read about raid-0 here:

http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=Single...

The best performing device for the OS is a good SSD with trim support.
The next best is a 1tb drive or a velociraptor.

The motherboards im looking at are...

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5

Asus P6TD Deluxe

Asus P6X58D Premium sata 6gbs

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 sata 6gbs

One more queston, if i fit a sata1 hdd on the same controller as some sata2 hdds, will it slow the faster hdds down to sata1 speed

thanks

You can mix sata1 and sata 2 devices without any problem.

Sata 1 and sata 2 refer to the speed that data from the hard drive buffer can be transmitted to the motherboard.
Today, no conventional hard drive can transfer data from the drive at even half of the sata 1 capability, much less sata 2.
Only the fastest of current SSD's today can saturate the slower sata 1 bus.

All the motherboards you are looking at are good.

Thanks for you help much appreciated