I am gonna start building a new computer for myself, and i really just don't know that much about raid. I tried checking wiki, but that crap is in all technical jargon. Anyways, i want to know if it is possible to stripe 3 hard drives, and have the array mirrored onto a 4th drive equal to the size of the other three. I understand that would bottleneck write speeds, but as i see it, any write penalty's would be one time on install. Read speeds would greatly benefit(i think). Or is raid 5 and 4 equally sized HDDs the answer im looking for? If so, what kind of performance difference is there from 3 raid 0's v 4 raid 5's.

Anyways, im a real big gamer, and ive been looking at a lot of the forums around here to compile what i want(something definitely over the top for sure). It could end up being a slow build, buy here, buy there. This will serve two purposes, one it will expand my budget, two i can wait for a few parts to come out and see if i really want them when they are released. I have a decent enough rig for now on my gaming conquests, and i will be sure to get warranty's to lengthen the life of my parts till i actually piece it together(proc and mobo last as their warranty's are short and expensive).

So i wanna start with the Hard drives, as that is far from as rapid out dates as other computer parts(if you don't count the rapid size increases that is). Anyways thanks for your input and sorry for the size of my post.

first question is , why raid? if its for speed, then most of the current drives out today will have on par speeds with a raid set-up. Raid in my opinion really has no practical use in a home desktop environment. Its just as simple to buy two big drive and use one to do a clone/back-up once a week or so, as opposed to buying 4 or more drives and setting up a raid array. You could also buy three drives and use one for OS ** a smaller one **, one for storage and one for back-up

raid 5 is the best in my opinion for data safety/redundencey.

That was another option i've been contemplating. Really i want speed and redundancy. A fairly decent storage capacity is always a plus though, as ill be buying a lot of e movies, and streamed games while i'm overseas(projected in about 6 months or so).

Well, here is what I used to run. 2 x 320GB Seagate drives in RAID 0, and a WD 250 GB that I just cloned my RAID over to once a week or so. Worked great for me. Untill some hardware problems unrelated to the drives changed my setup.

XXClone is an awesome program. Free also. |MG| XXCLONE 0.58.0

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I am running (2) 80 gig drives in RAID 0 and backing up to a third drive.

Adding an additional drive as you suggested would work the same.

The only drawback of this setup is that the backup is not realtime... so if a drive goes south, you will only recover data from the last manual backup you ran.

If you are willing to purchase 4 drives, why not look into a RAID 5 or RAID 10 arrays?