There are several raid "levels" and each identifies a different way of doing things. Your controller will support Raid 0 and Raid 1 so I'll concentrate on those:
Raid 1 (also known as mirroring) writes an identical copy of the data you send it to each drive. Effectively making a duplicate. When it reads, it reads half the data from each drive so your read speeds are increased. The big benifit from all this is that if one drive fails, your data is still intact. The big drawback is that you only get half the expected drive space. 2 40gig drives will yield 40gigs of space.
Raid 0 (also known as striping) writes half the data to each drive simultaneously. After a small bit of overhead you are effectively doubling the speed of your hard drive. Read's are at double speed as well. There is no lost drive space in this mode but the big drawback is that if you lose one drive you lose all the data on both! With the reliability of todays drives this isn't a huge concern, but a backup solution should be imlemented just in case.
The raid controller handles everything for you. It has it's own build in bios and utilities that can usually be access by hitting Ctrl-something during boot time. It will also come with software that can do the same thing from your desktop. As far as the operating system is concerned you only have one drive regardless of the # of physical drives.
It's all pretty simple - doesn't take rocket science to setup and Raid 0 is frickin fast (same league as SCSI).
You don't HAVE to have identical drives but it's really the best way to go about it. Using dissimilar drives will limit you to the capabilities of the weaker drive (in size and throughput).
Dig around, there are tons of articles on Raid. Go read up on Raid 5 - that's some interesting shiz.
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