IDE RAID for Gigabyte SINXP-1394, many many questions?????

[Laymen]

This is my mobo,

http://tw.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-SINXP1394(GA-8SQ800%20Ultra2).htm

it has built in support for IDE Raid(2xATA133)and this by connecting your two harddisks to IDE ports 3&4 instead of 1&2. So now my question as I am a total noob when it comes to RAID. First off, will my mobo deliver better speeds to my disks(or about the same speeds)as a RAID IDE controller you buy in the stores?

It says on the website that it supports,

RAID (0, 1, 0+1)
JBOD function and ATA133 interface
ITE GigaRAID Controller delivers completely solution for storage interface to improve fault tolerance data access performance.

Also when I run HDTach on my Maxtor 160Gb diamondmax 9 UDMA 133 with 8Mb cache when its just connected to IDE port 1, so no RAID or nothing I get read burst speeds of 86.3Mb/s and a random access time of 14.7ms, then at the end is says "Read speed Maximum 58.5Mb/s, minimum 20.1Mb/s, average 48.1Mb/s". So what kind of improvements can I expect when I try raiding two Maxtor 160Gb diamondmax 9 UDMA 133 with 8Mb cache on my built in RAID from my mobo?

Also what kind of RAID do you suggest, is RAID uberhaupt reliable or does it screw up your disks alot?? I know that there's this RAID version that copies or mirrors files on your disks but I know the advantage to that but just not the disadvantages? Which RAID should I go for as a gamer who doesn't do video encoding and seldom gets his disks completely full with data .
Also, I have ordered a 36Gb Cheetah SCSI disk which I will place as bootdisk, so the RAID setup will then serve as storage, is there something I should know when trying to set all this up??? So many questions and so far no answers

Any and all assistance will be very much appreciated, be as detailed as possible and feel free to bombard me with your insightfull responses!!!

Kind regards,

Peter

 

[nitromullet]

I don't run HDTach, so I don't really know how to answer your question in regards to that. However, you can probably find answers to most of your other questions here:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1491

 

[Laymen]

Thnx for the page, seems very interesting indeed Still would like to know about what RAID I should get, cuz I was wondering. For me it seems that RAID 0 ain't bad at all. What instances or by what reasons can you lose data on one of your RAID disks, and I know losing data on one disk will cause you to effectively lose your data alltogether with RAID 0. But when you think of it, if you have only 1 disk, no raid going or nothing and you loose a file you would effectively have lost it as well wouldn't you, so I don't really see the difference here???

If you'r like me and defragment your disks regularly and run virusscans regularly how else then can you loose data?? What do they mean with loss of data or lesser degree fault tolerance when they speak of the disadvantages of RAID 0? Is it something that happens to your RAID INI file or whatever it is that stores the information about your running RAID setup, could this be corrupted and be the cause of you losing your RAID partition and hence all your data? or are they just speaking about one of your hard drives physically crashing??