You are building a new system and you come to picking out a new hard drive. You want something fairly large, say a 40GB drive and you see the Maxtor 40GB ATA/100 ( the new standard in hard drive speed ) goes for around $210 dollars. ATA/100 is noticeably faster than ATA/66 drives and with many motherboards out there supporting this, it is a good idea to get one. Here is where RAID ( Redundant Array of Independent Disks ) comes into play. What this does is basically makes 2 hard drives work as one hard drive with twice the theoretical speed. That is the simple way to think about it. The price for a Maxtor 20GB ATA/100 drive is $125. If you got 2 of those you would have 40GB but that would run you $250, $40 more just to use this RAID
feature that you don´t even know all that much about.