raid and joining disks??

[lockmac]

Hi. I have a motherboard which supports RAID and I have just come across two identical 80GB HDD's. I dont know much about hte different levels of RAID but i remember getting told that you can join two disks together and make the computer think that they are one disk by using RAID... is this true?

I ask because I am going to use them as backup drives and my backup is 100GB.

Many thanks

 

[Nothinman]

The whole point of RAID is to combine disks in different ways while the OS only gets to see the final product. Usually the goal is additional reliability so you use RAID1 or RAID5 which allow the array to continue running in the event of a single drive failure. But there are non-redundant levels of RAID like RAID0 or just linear expansion that allow you to combine the total space of all of the drives into one big volume but if one drive fails you lose the entire thing.