A question regarding Raid

[mike11973]

I need to get out of the dark ages with my hard drives and move on up to Raid....the thing is I dont know the first thing about setting it up. A few questions I have are:
1) The best drive(s) to purchase.
2) Can I start with just 1 Raid Sata drive and eventually add on the 2nd later. Also can I use lets say a Sata drive for my primary and a Ide drive as my 2nd drive?
3) How do I set it up.

Any help you all can give is greatly appreciated.

 

[gaara]

Purchasing drives for a RAID is really no different than purchasing them for regular use. You'll basically be looking for speed, reliability and possibly noise and heat if those are issues.

RAID requires at least two hard drives to be considered a RAID, you need two hard drives that are identical, meaning the same brand, the same size, the same interface, the same type. You can't make a RAID with one drive.

Depends which RAID array you wish to setup, it can get a bit tricky though. Your motherboard should probably have built in RAID 0/1/0+1 controllers, and then you install the appropriate drivers, and configure it properly.