RAID?

This may sound stupid but what exactly is teh purpose of RAID on a motherboard? My A7V133 suports it but what does RAID do? Is it faster or something?

It allows you to configure 2 drives as one large drive with roughly twice the speed (Raid 0). Weakness is if one drive dies all data is toast and it works best with identical drives (capacity is twice the smallest and speed is twice the slowest).

If you had Raid 1 capability (A7V133 does not currently support raid 1) you could have 2 drives with redundant data stored so that if one drive dies your data is safe.

raid,redundant array of inexpensive drives.
it has 2 uses.raid 0 two drives(preferably identical)on seperate ide channels with identical data.it tries to avoid the hd bottleneck.it sees only 1 drive and accesses data without the normal wait cycles.the acces time varies depending on the size of requested files seeing the best increase in large file access like photoshop or cad applications.it is about 10 to 15 percent faster in such instances.the on die cashe is another workaround of this bottleneck.
raid 1 is mirrord disk in case 1 disc fails there would still be 1 disc completely intact.imho a good backup is cheaper.
if you decide to use it set up block size at 64.this is the most effective size seeing the best acces speed in combined applications.
i use it. i like it!