hd recommendation - raid or no?

[Guest]

I'm planning on building a 1 GHz Athlon TBird with the IWill KK266-R motherboard, and would like opinions on which if the following hard drive configs to go with:

(1) 2 Western Digital 40GB 7200rpm 400BB - $280
(2) 1 IBM DeskStar 75GXP 7200rpm 75GB - $275
(3) 1 Maxtor 60GB 7200rpm - $205

I'm leaning towards option 1 in order to utilize the RAID card, but would like to see what the experts think (never built a system before). I'll primarily be using this system for web development.

Also, I'm a newbie to RAID, so a couple of ques:

- Is RAID difficult to setup and configure?
- If I partition the drive, and one day have to rebuild the C: partition, will this be possible under the RAID config?

Thanks!

Peter

 

[mjdunn]

Raid is very simple!

Buy 2 or 3 smaller drives put them in a raid 0
Your OS will see it as one drive that you may partition how you like. As far as having to format the drive it will be no diff then just one drive (the OS thinks this is one drive)

I built my Tbird w/ 512 Ram it didn't seem any faster than my 800 then I went Raid.
One downfall to raid, once you go raid you can never go back

I now have 3 seagate barricude ata iii, I like them much better than my old maxtor's

 

[randomly]

I would stick with the IBM 60GXP or 75GXP's over the Maxtor, even in the raid config (get an appropriate size). You'll find that better drives make more of a difference than Raid/No Raid in actual use.