Thanks for your input and further offer of help. I have visited your website.... very interesting. The basis of my project is this (not very earth shattering):-
For the fun and personal satisfaction of it I decided to lash up my own PC from individually sourced bits. I wanted a high spec machine with an excellent graphics card for gaming, flight sim etc, plenty of storage space for my and my wifes work files, and some built in protection against data loss, hence the raid 1.
With the best will in the world backing up by conventional methods is a pain and with the ever increasing size of HDDs (and dropping cost) I thought that raid 1 would be a good solution... maybe not the best one, but adequate for home/ small business environment. So after much research into the choice of mobo I selected the gigabyte ga8INXP. Amongst other built in features it has on board raid (Promise 20276 chip with MBFastTrak133 'Lite' BIOS for the raid function).
However, the more I think about the more I question why I want the OS on its own HDD separate from the Array. If that HDD goes 'belly-up' badly whilst my data may be secure I may well lose the OS plus the other apps too. This clearly would be a huge headache to sort out especially in a year or so. Maybe a simple pair of drives in RAID 1 is best, partitioned suitably to keep the OS on its own? Should I then put the other apps together with the OS or put them in another partition, and a third one for the data? I'm just guessing as I am out of my depth now!
BTW,
I will also set up a wireless based LAN as follows:-
1x ADSL router -wireless capable. The old desktop PC (a Pent3 based machine), the new machine, my wife's laptop, plus all the usual printer/scanner etc as shared resources. I intend to have an area on the main PC to back up data off the laptop.
Any tips gratefully received!
B_L