To RAID or not to RAID.........

[hail-hail]

I have a new media PC with 1.5TB SATA HDD running Vista Home Premium.

I have just purchased 3 1TB SATA HHDs.

So should I RAID them?

I already have Vista on the 1.5TB HDD

RAID0 - distributes the data over all 4 disks, any one disk failure and everything is lost.
Can I setup RAID0 without having to reformat and reinstall Vista?

Should I even setup RAID0 I am only ripping DVDs, Home movies and Pictures to this PC. Pics and Home movies will be backed up to disc.

Do I really need RAID, or should I just use as 4 independent HDDs.

Apologies if some of this is a bit fuzzy, but I am new to this

alan

 

[hail-hail]

Thaks guys, some great info there. I have decided that for the time being I will not use raid.
I have 1x1.5 and 3x1TB disk all configured as individual disks. Movies run from the Hard Drive with no issue, even Blu Ray and HDDVD rips.

I will split my movies by genre over different HDDs. That way if one goes, then I have only lost a subset of my films and then it is just the pain of re ripping them.

Photos and home vidoes will be copied over 2 HDDs to give me a more secure feeling around these. I may also burn offline copies to Blu-Ray.

thanks again for all your input