Hi, If someone could answer these questions, I'd be really appreciative. 1. I'm getting a Asus P4P800 motherboard which has Serial ATA, RAID 0 capability. Does that mean I can just connect my hard drives (2 120GB Maxtor Serial ATA Drives) to my motherboard in a RAID 0 array? What advantages would I get? 2. What advantages are there from Windows XP Home to Windows XP Pro. Are the compatiblities in software and hardware the same? 3. Any size - what is the best hard drive out there now for Serial ATA? Thanks! : ) ps. I know my computer stuff, I've built my own PC but there are some hardware issues I don't know about yet.

Raid is a back up procedure. If you want to use both HD's for storage etc. RAID is not what you want. You also have to have a RAID adapter to set them upi as RAID> RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) A disk subsystem that increases performance and/or provides fault tolerance. RAID is a set of two or more hard disks and a specialized disk controller that contains the RAID functionality. Developed initially for servers and stand-alone disk storage systems, RAID is increasingly becoming available in desktop PCs primarily for fault tolerance. RAID can also be implemented via software only, but with less performance, especially when rebuilding data after a failure. RAID improves performance by disk striping, which interleaves bytes or groups of bytes across multiple drives, so more than one disk is reading and writing simultaneously. Fault tolerance is achieved by mirroring or parity. Mirroring is 100% duplication of the data on two drives (RAID 1), and parity (RAID 3 and 5) calculates the data in two drives and stores the result on a third drive: a bit from drive 1 is XOR'd with a bit from drive 2, and the result bit is stored on drive 3 (see OR for an explanation of XOR). A failed drive can be hot swapped with a new one, and the RAID controller automatically rebuilds the lost data.

OK and my Windows XP Q? Serial ATA if my motherboard has a Serial ATA connector, do I need a PCI Controller card?

I run a RAID set up with XP with no problems. If your mobo has built in RAID capability you do not need a PCI card. Siri

Morris; 1) almost no advantages. Only if you want to create a single, very large partition (raid 0, see my notes below) or if you are seriously concerned about data loss you can use raid 1(again, see my notes below). You may see some slight drive speed increase from using a raid 0 setup, but I doubt it would be very much as the drives will transfer data at the maximum bus with a single drive, so by moving data to two drives instead of one will divide the bus bandwidth between both drives. Either way, the CPU usage will be slightly increased, due to the work it must do because of all the extra data manipulation. 2) Unless you are a power user, XP home will be fine. If you needed XP pro, I would bet that you would know you needed it. Either one should handle SATA fine. 3) My personal opinion is that the drives from all the major manufactures are fairly good (I know, there are more than a few people that will disagree with that statement). I prefer Seagate harddrives drives, excellent hardware. There is a reason they have a very large following in the high performance server market. "my motherboard has a Serial ATA connector, do I need a PCI Controller card?" Absolutely not, only a Serial ATA cable to connect the HDD to the MoBo. "Raid is a back up procedure" Not true, raid 0 is used extensively (and pretty much exclusively) for increased HDD performance. By striping the data between two (or more) discs, a proper R0 setup will transfer data to/from HDD at a much higher rate. If you have 2 * 20 Gb drives striped together in a R0 configuration, the array will appear as a single 40 Gb drive to the operating system. The problem with this is that if one of the drives fail, you lose the data from both drives. This is because the data from the files is split up between the discs, hence: you lose half of every file on the array. I think what stump (nice cut and paste, by the way) was thinking about was raid 1, mirroring. Consider the same situation as before: 2 * 20 Gb drives together in a R1 array. This will appear to the Operating system as a single 20 Gb drive. This is because all files are written in their entirety to both drives, in other words, mirror images. The purpose of this is to provide data consistency. If one drive fails, then it can be replaced and the entire drive can be rebuilt from the other disc. This is not a backup solution either, as the not data not the least bit safe from corruption or tampering. A backup solution will allow the data to be completely recovered (to a given point in time) following a critical hardware or software failure. This is because a "proper" backup solution includes off-site storage of a data copy (not simply another drive in the same machine or array). This way data can be recovered following a data loss disaster, regardless of the cause. Yes, in r1 (or other raid configurations) data from a damaged HDD can be recovered. But what about data lost due to a flood, fire, hardware theft, accidental (or intentional) deletion, user stupity? No way raid is going to save anyone from that.

Sorry, forgot to mention; "A failed drive can be hot swapped with a new one" ONLY if you are using hardware that specifically supports hot swapping, typical ONLY in the server market, and ONLY with SCSI. S-ATA will eventually support this, but again, only on hardware built specifically for the server market to support this. Do NOT try this with your Mother Boards integrated S-ATA controller, severe hardware damage could, and probably would, occur!