Ok I went and done it! I decided to shoot the moon. The question is how to setup mirror and stripping both and how many harddrives to do it on Asus A7N8X-E (Deluxe). The motherboard manuals for asus suck! To make such good boards why such crappy manuals? Anyway one part of the book says you can and one part says nothing about it. I have two sata slots for sata drives and of course the other two primary ides. Next question is if you do stripping and miror together does that cut down on the performance of stripping as opposed to doing stripping alone? Any suggestions on best sata drives at the moment? Any good websites anyone know of to explain raid in simple terms and the functions of raid. I dont fully understand the process of after building computer and putting drives in proper place for raid installing the operating system. Do you install windows differantly running a raid array? Lots of questions but raid is new buisness to me and not a lot of clear information anywhere. Im ready to get this new asus board with this new amd 3200 barton screaming but need a few answers first. Thanks.

Opps another question. Asus has recommended memory for board but doesnt say anything about any cL 2 memory modules in the whole list. I wonder if this memory would be ok. http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=80097-8

Raid 0+1 requires a minimum of 4 drives. For best result they need to be identical in size and peformance. I have seen benchmarks that indicate that Raid 0+1 is generally slower than Raid 0 except for random reads. Raid 0: Striping Raid 1: Mirroring Raid 0+1: Striping + Mirroring Striping means that the data is split up between two or more drives so that when the data is read or written the computer does so simultaneously on all drives. This is faster than just using one drive for the data. The down side is that if one of the drives fails all data is lost since the data on the other drive(s) is useless. Mirroring with two drives means that as data is written to one drive it is also written to the other drive. If one drive fails then the data can still be obtained from the other drive. Striping + mirroring combines the speed of striping with the redundency of mirroring. RAID.edu http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html The skinny on RAID http://www.arstechnica.com/paedia/r/raid-1.html