Computer hunting

Well My history with computers has been an interesting one, right now I'm looking around because I want to get a new one as soon as I can get a job (absolute hell) to replace my turn of the century compaq (with heavy modification) {and yes I know compaq was never very good, but I got what was at the time a pretty sharp system for 450 dollars}

Meanwhile, I'm looking at various things that have happened since I last maintained a computer, and there are some things I haven't quite gotten up to, I'm fully open to reccomendations but I'd really like to have a board that I can run SLI on,

also what is the difference between RAID 0 and RAID 1, I know one is mirroring and one is striping but what is the real difference?

if nothing else I'd like to know the raid one

 

Basicly...

Raid 0 - packs all of the disks in that array into the same disk, " striping" them all into a line. Which is pretty basic and boring as far as Raid goes.

Raid 1 - is Mirroring, which is often used by computer servers. They will have 2 disks as Raid 1 and the frist is the Real working drive, but everything that is writen/edited on the first drive is mirrored exactly onto the second drive. Which is great because if the first drive physically dies, you simply switch second disk into the first slot and put another drive into the second to become the new mirrored disk.

 

so w\ zero I have a huge super drive and with one I have a smaller but super fast invincible drive?

 

raid 1 isn't necessarily faster, it's just always backed up.

so when your drive asplodes, you've already got a backup.

 

I suggest you get a socket 939 (64 bit AMD) processor and motherboard, that is currently the next BIG thing for computing. You can find some nice quality and cheap motherboards at newegg.com (Click here) Good luck!

 

w\ SLI (one of the things that is going to be heavy into my descision) that'd be an asus, I can't for the life of me remember the model but it'd be an asus, are asus boards any good?

 

http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131517

This is THE Mobo!

 

Exactly the s.o.b I was looking for Thanks