How to Use RAID drives in your laptop

Q. I have bought a new Acer Laptop, which has two 320GB hard drives. When I enter the BIOS and make a RAID set and set it to striping I see the two drives as 320GB each. However, when I then install Windows Vista, it shows only one drive with a capacity of about 700GB. Why don’t I see two drives, as well as can I use a partitioning program to split this huge drive into two?
A. You have opted to make a RAID zero set, which writes alternate blocks of data to each of your two drives. This is known as striping, as well as is created for systems where you need very quick read and write speeds. A RAID zero setup treats your two drives as one contiguous block of data, hence it only shows up as one drive. RAID zero is not a good idea if you are worried about data integrity, because if one drive fails, then you will lose all of your data. Instead, choose a RAID one setup, otherwise known as mirroring. Here, your two drives will be identical copies of each other, as well as if one drive fails, you can replace it and the data on the other drive will be copied across. You will also still only see one drive, because if you could see both, you would see duplicates of everything, which would confuse both you and Windows.