[Zogthetroll]

Cool, thanks a lot for the link to that RAID article. that was definately the sort of thing i was trying to find. I was previously confused about the different RAID types. So if i've got this right, raid 1, aka disk striping, doesn't really protect the data from errors(not a huge deal really), more for massive hd failure? or does it have ecc or similar and I just missed that? At any rate, that would be faster, RAID 5 is more concerned with integrity of data on the drive, and actually compares the data coming from the different drives, hence the performance hit. does that sound right? and raid 5 also does rebuilds if a hd crashes?
as for the general performance, space, etc that i'm thinking of, I probably won't use this on my main rig. Mainly what this would be for would be my music collection (i've got my entire cd collection on mp3's on my hd), my web page, which I might try to host once I get rid of this pesky dial-up thing, and a lot of other programs, etc that i've collected. i think 120Gb overall would probably be plenty, and those are seriously coming down in price. I saw a deal recently on them for $60! and i'm not going to be seriously concerned about lag since I would be using this as a fileserver and would be accessing over the network.
on another note, what versions of windows support software RAID, and how buggy is it?
*edit* hehehe, meant to say raid 1=mirroring, but thanks for catching that.