How does 4 harddrive raid work? PLEASE READ!!!!

Im gonna get the Chaintech ZNF3-150 mainboard. It is considered the best athlon 64 based board so that is what im going with. It says it supports 4 SATA drives. So if i bought 4 120GB sata harddrives, would i be able to put all 4 together to make 1 super fast 480GB harddrive?

It does depend on the raid controller. It should let you to a RAID0 stripe accross four drives, but that will decrease the MTBF of the entire array significently. Remember, if one drive fails, your whole array is shot. Alternatively, you could go with a 0+1 array that stripes accross two mirrored drives (or mirrors two striped drives, I forget). That would give you redundancy and speed (but not as much speed and half the capacity). If I were you, I'd invest in a card capable of hardware RAID 5.

RAID levels:
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_05.html

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProdu...-152-031&catalog=22&manufactory=BROWSE&depa=1



here is a link to the mainboard. it says it has raid 0,1,5, and 10. So would the onboard one be good enough?

Yes, it would. I don't think the mean time between faliures matters that much AT ALL for a desktop. When was the last time a drive that was still under warranty pooped out on you for no reason?