MacBook Raid

[Ender]

I have a 80gb external firewire hard-drive and wanted to create a mirror raid of my internal 80gb hard-drive with it. Would i need to backup my internal's data before hand and what would be the best way to go about doing this?

Also would their be a performance difference with a mirror raid?

 

[Ender]

and probably have to install a flavour of Linux in order to do it, would make this a bit senseless.

OSx has a software raid feature, but yea having read a bit more into it- it seems it would be far more hassle then it is worth

Thanks