Reinstall, raid or not to raid

[realscot]

I'm away to swap my 36gb raptor's for a 500GB SE16 AAKS with my mate. Since I will have to reinstall I was thinking of putting on Vista. Having not had any experience with Vista I was wonderin what I'd be best to do.

I will have 1x 500GB SE16, 2x 250GB SE16 & 1x 160GB (old ide wd)

Do I make a new raid array with the 250's and run vista from it, or just put vista on the 500gb one? I want to install XP on the 160 IDE and dual boot with vista from one of the sata's. I'm assuming I can do that?

 

[SiriusB]

Do you really need a RAID array? RAID0 will give you slightly better performance at double the risk of losing your data... or RAID1 which again gives slightly better performance at the cost of half the capacity. If you need lots of redundancy then go RAID1. It's up to you basically

Dual booting from both a SATA and IDE HDD is absolutely fine. I run WinXP from my SATA Hitachi Deskstar and Ubuntu Linux from my IDE Maxtor [I know, I know! ]