Looking for some opinions for system I'm working on...

I pretty much have down what I'm getting.

All I really need to decide on at this point is the Hard Drive situation.

I have a couple different options. I can run two 74GB Raptors in RAID0 or RAID1 with a 250GB hard drive to store most of my media and other junk like that(and in a month or so would upgrade that to a significantly larger hard drive).

Or I could just buy a 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM drive for a little less money.

What are your thoughts? Do yall think the Raptors in a RAID 0 would make that much of a difference? Also, I would be buying the Raptors recertified from Fry's.

If it makes a difference here is the basics of what my system will be running:

Windows 7 64-Bit
AMD Phenom II X4 965BE
4GB(2x2GB) 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM
Nvidia 8800GTX(though in a few months will be switching to ATI 58xx series)
Antec TP-750W PSU(more than I need, but got it for a good price)
Forget the exact motherboard, but it does support RAID.

Opinions are much appreciated as I'm hoping to purchase this on Sunday.

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I personally would be a bit leery about running in Raid 0 like that - I think you might like a high speed drive for your system drive for faster startups, but with Raid 0 if you lose one...well, you're done.

I think I'd get the larger drive for now, then see about saving a few more ducats in the future for a SSD drive - their price seems to be ready to drop a decent bit again.

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Thats what my biggest concern is to be honest. If these were brand new I wouldn't really worry much, but they have been recertified by Western Digital which means something has gone wrong with them at some point.

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Yeah, they could have just been returned immediately for a larger size, but then someone may have used them for several months, so you never know. While I might take a flier on one if they were really cheap, I'd certainly reformat it and go from there.

But if it were me, I'd go another way and let someone else be the guinea pig for those.

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RAID 0 will eventually lead to tears. In exchange for hypothetical minor performance gains, which may or may not actually be realized in whatever application you're using (remember that simply running through a RAID system has a certain amount of overhead losses), you're increasing the complexity of your system in a way that dramatically increases failure chance, and makes recovery in case of certain failures more difficult. (You cannot, for instance, just pop the drives out of the system into an external case to get at your data in case of failure elsewhere in the system. )

Hardware RAID 1 theoretically provides enough reliability increase to outweigh the added complexity. Whether it's worthwhile for home / desktop computers is a matter of debate; a good backup plan (e.g. external drive) protects against far more sorts of failure.

I'd just go with the larger single drive, and put some of that "upgrade later" money toward a good external backup drive when you can.

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