Gints, what motherboard do you have? The Intel chipset boards with the ICH5 RAID controller on board will do RAID for free. You need SATA drives though.

WinXP may also have software RAID, but I don't know if that's any good. It will use up some CPU so that could defeat the point of RAIDing (RAID is supposed to give more performance).

Glenn, I just bought a Gigabyte 875P motherboard, but it doesn't have the RAID controller. The price difference between this motherboard and its RAID-enabled brother was $50, while a RAID card is about $40. So, the card costs me about as much, but I can't comment on its performance relative to the motherboard chip.

Basically, I want one system disk, one DVD Auxilliary file disk for writing projects, and one RAID array for reading/writing uncompressed video data.

The RAID-enabled brother might have another hardware RAID controller on top of the Intel ICH5 one. The second RAID controller might suck, but the Intel one should be decent. Are you sure you don't have ICH5 RAID on your board? (some motherboards actually don't, but most 875P boards should...)

Glenn,

Well, golly. I read the manual, which is confusing because it's for two motherboards. You're right, I do have a RAID controller, but it's for SATA only, according to what I can make out in the manual. Thank you.