I've had an MSI RAID board for about a year now, I'm so-so with it all. I was running a pair of IBM hard drives RAID 0 for speed, and about every month had to reformat because so much data was getting lost it slowly got to where it wouldn't even boot up.

I switched to a pair of WD 80's and ran it that way a few months with no problems at all.

Later I bought a pair of the 8MB 120's, and sold one of the 80's, which is where I'm at right now. Even though I finally ahd success running RAID, I ditched it all together.

Currently I have both 120's hooked up individually to the RAID channels. The remaining 80 is off the normal IDE channels, along with a high speed CD ROM, a burner, and a DVD player (so really all I'm doing is using the RAID channels simply to add more devices). The 80 itself has its ground wiresrun to a switch on the front of the box.

Last time I installed (many moons ago), I set one 120 to hold my O/S and all the programs I have installed. The other is just for MP3 and movie storage (nowhere near filled yet overall). The 80 is turned on once in a while just to make backups of things onto and then back off.

I have run my setups at RAID 0 and just normally - and even though the benchmarks showed about a half again performance boost, in real life I could tell no difference at all (partly from a tweaked Athlon 1.4 running ~1550 and a half gig of RAM perhaps). I couldn't rip a CD any faster, I couldn't load a game or the O/S any faster, and I barely could even transfer from disk to disk faster. I timed a ton of different things and eventually decided it made very little difference. Perhaps it's just due to what I use my PC for - when I need power, it seems to be CPU based needs and not hard drive needs.

So now I just use the RAID channels to have 6 instead of 4 devices. And with the 80 on the switch, I have a really reliable backup for home use in case something happens to the main drives.

Lots of babbling, hopefully some part of it was helpful.

BTW, glad you got a big drive, those you linked at the top were really poor in the size / dollars ratio, not to mention slow!