Haha, thanks a lot you guys.

For the moment, I think I might try the onboard RAID. Later, with more money, I may god card-based, but for now I'll stick to the cheapest I can

Based on that, I have one more question: is it possible to run two RAID's on the same onboard system? Here is what I'm thinking:

1) buy a second 100GB drive, and use RAID 1, thereby keeping my DATA safer.

2a) buy a couple small, fast IDE drives and run a RAID 0 for the OS and programs. thereby getting a good speed advantage.

2b) forget about RAID for the OS and buy the fastest single drive I can find, for as you said, OS's are replaceable.

So as you may have figured, I'd try 1 and 2a or 2b. But I'm not sure how it works if you want two seperate systems running. Any idea how that would work? I would like to keep the OS and data seperate.