I now have three 74gb raptors and was thinking of putting all 3 in a raid 0 setup. Any thoughts or advice on this idea? Someone suggested a Raid 5 setup as well. Not sure what to do

I once had 2 raptors in a raid-0 set. Unforunately I had it as my OS drive and one day it got borked. As long as it's not your OS drive, go right ahead, it's the best you can get without buying the 300G Velo's or SSD's or all sorts of other expensive getups.

I have 100% faith in the drives, it's the raid controller on the mobo I don't much like, that's why I bought the 2405 for my SSD's.

ok fair enough. I was actually thinking about using three 74gb raptors in a raid 5 setup for my main OS drive. My understanding is that a raid 5 setup gives you the speed increase of a Raid 0 setup while giving you the security of a Raid 1 setup. A happy medium of sorts. Do I understand that right?

That is correct. Although I'm pretty sure that Raid5 that runs from software is pretty craptacular, and you'd be better off running it off a dedicated card.

Also I don't know what kind of RAID options you motherboard supports as well.

No and no.

In Raid5, each block goes through a parity check operation, thus it is not as fast as Raid 0.

Raid 1 is mirroring, while RAID5 using a parity comparision to check for an error.

You may wish to read the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

you get nothing for free man. If you're not worried about your boot OS, then go RAID 0. I personally have never had an issue and have been using RAID 0 since '98 or so.

If you have critical data, then mirroring is your best bet.

With your three drives, I would suggest putting two in a raido for your OS, then use the third for programs, data, temp, and temp internet files.

I am not really concerned about losing any data because I have everything backed up on a couple 1TB drives but I do have three 74gb raptors that I have to use. Would I get any better performance using 3 drives in Raid 0 over 2 drives. As for motherboard I have an Asus Striker 2 Formula. I am not sure how good the raid is on that board. Any input?

Another thing is with raid 5, if one drive goes tits up then you'd still need another drive handy to rebuild it.

If you backups of all yer useful info on a regular basis, then there is no reason to not go raid 0.

"NVIDIA MediaShield™ RAID Support RAID 0,1,0+1,5,JBOD span cross Serial ATA drives"

And that's one of the reasons I use dedicated raid cards from now on. I personally have never had any experience with the 780i chipset, but I've read mixed results with the raid.