Beginner to RAID; many questions

[Khaydarin]

Ok.....

Until a few days ago I had a 60 GB hard drive and an 80 GB. My friend just gave me his old 80 GB (though unused). All of the hard drives are 7200 RPM, just slightly different brands. Could I used the 2 80 GB-ers for a RAID?

I understand that there are 2 different kinds of RAIDs - mirroring and stripping. Mirroring would be when the hard drives have the exact same information on them (duplicates), and stripping would be when they split the information. As far as I know, mirroring would be "safer," and stripping would give me more performance. I'm more interested in stripping.

I do not know how to hook up a RAID, but I believe I would used the SATA cables. Is there a special way to hook them up to the ports on my mobo?

Once I hook up the two hard drives - and they would both have to be reformatted, correct? - how would I tell my PC to use them in a RAID, and furthermore use the stripping method?

Thanks!

[general]

Well there are more types of raid than those two, but those are the only ones for two drives. Striping (not stripping) does give more performance when moving large files. This is generally useful for people who do professional video work. For a desktop user, striping should really be avoided. You will greatly increase (probably something like 4 times due to double the chance of drive failure and a large chance that the raid will be corrupted) the chances of losing all of your data. You would be doing all of this for basically not much performance increase. If you want to play around with it to learn, then go with mirroring. In case one drive fails then your data is safe and you won't have the chances for corruption that you would otherwise.

In terms of hooking it up, you would either need a motherboard that supports RAID or a RAID card. You would hook the drives up as you would normally. You would just need to follow the instructions from the manual of the RAID card or the motherboard.