Will this decrease drive performance?

I've got an 80GB drive right now (see sig), and I'm starting to run out of space. I want to buy another, identical 80GB for SATA raid 0, but I've heard that with raid 0, if one drive fails, all data is lost, so I'd either have to make frequent backups or do raid 0+1. I want to save a little money, so I'm wondering if I can have my two main 80GB drives raid 0, and then have them mirror to a single 160GB drive, but will this decrease performance? If it does, is there some way to do incremental nightly backups that will backup both my windows and linux partitions?

With RAID 0, your two drives are essentially treated as a single drive. I.e. 2 x 80GB = 1 X ~160. If there is a 2KB file, half of it (1KB) is on one drive, and the other half is on the other drive. That way a 2KB files will sorta load as fast as a 1KB file... sorta.

So yes, if one drive fails, data is lost. I am not sure if you can mirror to a single 160GB drive. I think you can, but am not completely sure. The performance of such a RAID 0+1 setup would be slightly slower than just a RAID 0, but not too much.

I'm not so sure about incremental nightly backups. I mean, you could do part of your data every night manually, but I'm not aware of any automated setup (there probably is though, somewhere).

However, If you do go with a RAID 0+1 setup, you don't really need to worry about backups that much.

Hope this helps,

-YB