You're misunderstanding a little bit here. What you want is not RAID, you just want two drives, one for the OS and software and one for your data. This is a common setup. While there are minor performance advantages, the major payoff comes in that it's simply much easier to reinstall windows. Having two drives also gives you options for quick backups (assuming they are large enough).
RAID, is a "redundant array of inexpensive disks." There are many levels involving many configurations. RAID, at any level, has two specific functions: data reliability and/or enhanced performance. When you build a RAID, you are building a SINGLE VOLUME out of multiple drives.
With RAID 0, you basically just have disk striping, meaning that data is written in small "stripes" to two or more disks. The benefit of course is speed. A two-disk RAID 0 can improve sustained disk performance by 150-200%. With RAID 0, your volume size is equal to about the size of the two drives combined (e.g. 30GB + 30GB = 60GB). The risk of RAID 0 is that if just one of the drives fails, you lose the entire volume...thereby you're basically (let's say I'm statistically challenged) doubling your chances of data loss. Even extreme data recovery software might not be able to recover data from an array with a bad drive as easily as it could from a single drive.
RAID 1, in contrast, is basically disk mirroring. You have two disks creating a single volume equal to the size of one of the disks (e.g. 30GB + 30GB = 30GB). Data is written to both drives simultaneously, such that if one drive fails, the system will still be up. You can then replace the bad drive and recreate the array without losing data. There are some performance benefits while reading data, because data can be read in chunks off both drives...but there is often a small hit in writing data. The downside is of course cost, and that you lose data redundancy while waiting to replace a bad drive.
RAID 0+1 is as its name implies - the combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1, using 4 total drives. Downsides are of course cost, heat, noise, and so on.
Most of the RAID levels up from there consist of data striping with parity....more complex systems that don't have as much benefit in recording and aren't typically offered by IDE RAID controllers.
All of that said, I don't think RAID is worth it. You don't need the performance for audio, as a single 7200RPM drive will work, but there are other headaches such as controller issues (many IDE RAID controllers are flakey), cost, risk of data loss, etc. Plus you can't just pull your data drive out of one system and plop it into a new system.
What's important when recording is that you have at least a 7200RPM drive of enough capacity to hold your audio, and that you can back it up.
Slackmaster 2000
