Originally Posted by
pa_sjo
RAID is not a replacement for backup. RAID is a method of maintaining availability. If availability is not critical (eg, an evening restoring a system from a backup is acceptable), then the obvious choice if only two disks are available would be RAID 0 as for this particular application, disk I/O performance is key.
I know that (umpteen years of IT Technical Support and system building taught me that), but it saves a whole lot of heartache, and saves restoring the last backup that you performed two years ago because you kept putting it off 'until next time'.
If you're gonna push the boat out , 0+1 is the next best thing.
Also, bear in mind that 64 bit OSs don't run 32 bit programs particularly well, if they run at all. Unless you can get a 64bit version of photoshop, and anything else that you'll run, leave 64bit alone until it's matured.
The best drives are SCSI drives for RAID, but then you'll need an expensive SCSI RAID adapter, and SCSI drives are expensive anyway - they always have been simply because they're superior to IDE (and more recently, SATA). You can use any SATA hard disk to create a RAID array if your SATA controller supports RAiD, but, try to get two identical drives, but try and ensure they're from a different batch. If one batch is defective, and you've got two from that batch together (for the sake of argument), there's a higher likelihood of them both failing together.