Ideal Raid setup?

[dmo]

I'm looking to build a new base system with an Athlon XP chip, PC2700 Ram and a couple of hard disks in a Raid (striping, or striping + mirroring if I can afford it!). This will be a workstation mainly, since I've become rather too old and boring to play computer games now... Oddly enough, my main priority when building this PC will be how quiet it is! Other than that, I need big fast hard disks, and lots of memory.

Here's my shortlist:

Motherboard:
Asus A7V333 - Raid 0/1, Sound, Firewire, USB 2 (nice features)
ABit KX7-333R - Raid 0/1/0+1
Gigabyte GA-7VRXP - Raid 0/1, Network, Sound


Hard Disk:
IBM 120GXP
Maxtor 740X
Seagate BarracudaATA IV (ultra quiet)
Caviar (8 MB cache)


OS:
Windows 2000 (currently using)
Windows XP Pro - is it worth the cost?


Any thoughts on what I should go for? Are there other boards & disks I
haven't thought of?

Or perhaps there is something new on the horizon I should wait for?

TIA

 

[Woodchuck2000]

Go for a couple of The WD 8Mb cache drives. I would suggest that you get a couple but don't create a RAID Array. Unless you can afford 4 drives for a 0+1 setup, you're running a much higher risk of data loss. They're very fast drives and for workstation use, clever separation of the swap file and program files can speed things up considerably.

 

[azkiwi]

Ok I'll bite - how would I cleverly separate my swap file and program files? I have 4 HDDs but only two are identical (WD 8mb). I would prefer to Raid 1 for autobackups of data, but would appreciate thoughtful reasoning on any setup.