im new to computers so i dont know too much but ive heard about putting harddrives in RAID 0 to so things can run much faster and i was wondering which would be faster two 7,200 rpm drives in RAID 0 or a single 10,000 rpm drive

also ive read that its somewhat dangerous to use RAID 0 because data can be lost on both drives if one gets messed up, i never had a harddrive issue before so do comments of RAID 0 being dangerous not really apply?

does anyone have any thoughts on this at all?

any ideas at all is a good help to me

thanks

Yep, it will happen. That is because the information is split between two drives. If you have it all on one drive and something happens you may be able to recover some of your information. I am not saying you will lose everything I am saying you will need an expert to recover it and they still may not be able to. If in RAID 1 you have the OS corrupted a coached novice can use common programs to recover data. I would believe it would be safer and less complicated to use 1 drive with a large cache (16Mb). I believe from what I understand you would better off investing in more RAM than a RAID controller and ultra-high speed (10k or 15k) hard drives.
I would recommend 2 drives. one for your Operating System and programs and one for your data. If you have to reinstall windows your unique or creative data will already be relatively safe on the second drive. Unless you are into high end gaming stick with the 7200rpm drive. IMHO

RAID hasn't shown much use for the average home user. Heck, it hasn't shown any real-world performance for the high-end game either. It's for servers that need that high bandwidth, even still, they can use SCSI drives for that bandwidth.

acklan, when u said "I would recommend 2 drives. one for your Operating System and programs and one for your data" what kind of data do you mean if i have the operating system and programs on one, what would go on the second drive?

thanks for your help, it was very informative

He means music, photos, word documents, anything you wouldnt want to lose in the event of a C: failure

thanks, i get it now

Yep, that is what I meant. Anything you cannot reinstall. Don't bother saving programs. If you have to reins6tall XP you will have to reinstal all of your programs. The are inter woven with XP and cannot be saved.