It depends on what level of RAID you're going to use. RAID 0 is known as striping. It will break data down into small chunks and put the alternating chunks of data onto the two drives. Kind of like writing odd numbers with your left and even numbers with your right hand simultaneously. The benefit of this is that write times are much faster. However seeks times will stay the same or even slow down a bit. If you use two 40GB hard drives your computer will see it as one big 80GB drive since each physical drive contains half of the total data. Unless you do a lot of disk intensive work such a video editing or large file transfers then RAID 0 isn't worth it. You won't see much improvement in normal everyday usage and virtually no improvement in games.
In RAID 1 one hard drive mirrors the other, which means that at any given time your two drives will be exact replicas of eachother. This level is used when data integrity is of the utmost importance because if one drive fails then you can just remove it and still have another drive which is a mirror image of the other. However, since your computer is writing all of the data to both drives then writes times will be comparable to using a single drive if not a little slower. Once again seek times will stay the same or slow down a bit when compared to a single drive. Most home users never use RAID 1.
One other thing, a RAID array will only perform as well as the smallest and slowest drive in the array. For example, if you create a RAID 0 setup with a 20GB 5400 RPM drive and a 30GB 7200 RPM drive then the array will only be 40GB (20GBx2) and run at 5400 RPM. My suggestion to you is that you just stick with you 7200 RPM drive unless you absolutely need the benefits of a RAID 0 because with two 5400 RPM drives your seek time will suffer.
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