OK so until about 3 weeks ago I've had mostly the same gear for about 4 years or so. I was finally able to put together a newish render machine for myself by replacing my CPU, MoBo, RAM, and Video card and keeping my drives and case. Well I've been dragging my old IDE drives around for awhile(2 totaling all of 120G) but the new MoBo only has one IDE channel. Which means one drive I used mostly for backups got pulled and my extra CD drive is disconnected. Given the situation and the fact that 120G isn't really enough to house all my image data I should probably pay the 100$ or so to move on to SATA drive(s). However, I'm not 100% sure how I want to go about the RAID setup. Now I must say I find the idea of the twin striping drives to be very appealing in that I push a lot of image data around and drive speed historically has been something that has bothered me to some degree. On the other hand I'm not to sure about doubling the risk of drive failure. I do all the family photography as well as have lots of my personal work I'm not too hot on loosing. That being said I do back up all my stuff on DVD's and store them in a fire box. The whole mirrored thing is great but I imagine is overkill in my case. Then I could always go with the single drive thing too. So anyway I'm just looking for peoples thought's and history on the whole RAID thing.