3 drives setup

[stereosteve99]

I just have a question on the advantage of having 3 drives. I understand when people get 2 drives and put them in RAID 0, but I've seen a lot of people getting 3 drives, such as this:

AMD Barton 2500 (stock settings for now) water cooled
MSi K7N2 Delta-ILSR mobo
2 x Corsair pc3200 256 meg mem
2 x WD SATA Raptors in raid 0 config 64k stripe
1 x WD special edtion 80gig hd

how does this setup work/benefit?

[hoytron]

I have setup systems with 3 hard drives before, simply in case a problem arises with a RAID setup. It is helpful to have a boot hard drive that is not part of a striped array, in case something comes up and you need to reinstall windows. It is similar to whay people have different partitions for the OS and media.

[stereosteve99]

So if you had the two Raptors in a RAID 0 setup, then you would just have a bigger drive used as a backup? not in any RAID setup?

[hoytron]

You could use the other drive for whatever you want I suppose. I was just saying that I use it as a failsafe boot drive. I have had problems with windows not finding the RAID controller driver, and not booting. In this case, it would be beneficial to boot from a single hard drive, and use the RAID setup for fast manipulation of multimedia files and such.