Any Raid Experts?

[johnklos]

The best bang for the buck for multiple drives is to get a HighPoint eSATA RAID card. The 622 is a two eSATA port card that can use up to 10 drives, and the 644 or 2314 has four ports and can use up to 20. eSATA port multiplier enclosures are not horribly expensive. A Sans Digital five bay enclosure, for instance, is around $200 USD from NewEgg.

RAID-0 (sic) shouldn't even be discussed. It's not RAID since R in RAID stands for redundant, and striping drives makes things less safe than keeping them on a single drive. (Is there such a thing as negative redundancy?)

The simplest RAID setup is simple mirroring. Most x86 motherboards support BIOS-based mirroring. I'm not sure whether Windows has software mirroring, but just about any Unix-like OS (BSD, OS X, GNU/Linux) has software-based mirroring. You can also buy hardware-based mirroring enclosures which appear as one drive to OSes which don't have support (such as AmigaDOS).

If you're worried about viruses, then that implies you're using Windows. There's nothing RAID can do that can save you from that. Your only option then is to maintain two copies of everything, which is what others have said above.

[johnklos]

This description sounds like JBOD (just a bunch of disks) and is NOT in any way a raid. It is an array, yes. and will set any disk of any size into an array of ONE logic drive. However. if one disk fails... ALL data is lost...
i have tried it!!!
(linux and LVM may rescue your back...)
(unless you mount the drives as separate drives...)

No, the cards I posted all do hardware-based RAID-5. (I did mention that they're RAID cards.)

Raid 0, or striping is performance wise the fastest setup.
It is good for, lets say. striping two disks as SYSTEM disks.
IF you are cautious about your placement of files you have no real loss if one drive fails.

There are no benefits of AID-0 (not RAID) which can survive data loss. The only way it's even possible to recover data from an AID-0 setup is if you set up two disks as a concatenated set and the filesystem supports growing, but doesn't yet grow to the second drive, meaning it's worthless to even consider such a setup. Failure of any drive in AID-0, for all practical purposes, means loss of all data.

Or you could set up multiple drives in raid 0, as a master drive for video editing. Recording the master to that drive before packing it and burning it to BD disks or moving it to your raid 5 for storage.
Raid 0 suits the needs of a fast drive to handle drive intensive operations.
And always remember to back up files.

AID-0 is no faster at lots of small I/O than RAID-1 or RAID-5 since you're still waiting for the mechanical movement of heads and you're still waiting for the average rotational latency period. AID-0 is faster for streaming contiguous files faster, though.

Without redundancy, though, it's pretty much worthless these days since even the inexpensive HighPoint cards I mentioned can do uncompressed full 1080 resolution high definition video with RAID-5.