noobie needs help

[rersoap]

Help!! I have been out of the loop for awhile and need some help. I am in the process of putting together a new computer. My old one is a PIII 733, 256 mb of ram, 80 gig hard drive (maxtor I think) and asus mb(cannot remember name) cd player, floppy drive etc.

I want to upgrade almost everything except the monitor, keyboard/mouse, printer and scanner.

My question is the following:

I want to go from my old ata hard drive to sata (thinking about seagate 7200.10 320gb) and not sure if I should think about raid or not. Is raid 0 much faster than just one hard drive? I will be playing some games (fps) but will probably not be online for it and my wife will also be using the computer for photo shop, illustrator etc. for design work. Also, can I go with raid 0+1 and can I do that with just 3 hard drives or will I need 4? Or should I just start backing up to an extra hard drive rather than using raid 1? Sorry for rambling so much.

 

[digital_exhaust]

This is just my opinion, so take it for what it's worth.

I would go with a 10k os/game drive, and a large (500g) storage/app drive and stay away from the whole raid thing alltogether.

That's just me though.

 

[Happy Hopping]

The cost effective pt. for a hard drive is around a 250 to 320GB. In other words, the price you pay for a 500GB hard drive is equal to 2 x 300 GB hard drive. So why not? Just in case 1 fail, you still have the 2nd one. I also won't go w/ RAID