As long as you you have a solid internet connection and computer, you will be just fine. Technology has improved over the years where you basically just need abit more ram and a decent processor speed. I used to invest in robust computers, and now i am hardly utilizing it. My advice, dont go crazy... but in the end, it depends on what kind of software you are using. oh, go and get yourself a nice 2-4port video card if you dont have one.
Actually Raid 5 is not striping and mirroring (that's Raid 0+1, although there is also a Raid 10 configuration that's an alternative way of doing fault tolerant striping). Raid 5 is striping with distributed parity (ECC) blocks - not mirroring (a hardware implemented Raid 3 config is often better than Raid 5).
Make sure that the use is appropriate. What is the purpose of your Raid setup? And please tell me that you are doing this with real networking (hopefully Novell) software. You might be setting yourself up for more troubles than you understand right now. Raid, mirrored, stripped drives? Those are heavy user setups for just trading/word processing platforms. Quake and Doom aren't that serious!
RELIABILITY.......is the Point. Whether you pinch pennies or throw Bucks at it to achieve it. A down week can easily cost you the price of a new system or two. Not to mention the Frustration Factor that comes with Losing Data.
OK, but stripping in this instance is not the answer. According to the patient, there is only one un-networked computer. That is not a good "Tech" advised method to take care of the issue of "reliability." That is too broad a term to plan a solution like stripping for. Saving data can be easily achieved by simply adding a 10 gig hd for "data only." Simple, concise, cheap insurance. There are a lot of other things that could fill the bill if you know what the real underlying issue is.
The computation as to whether you even need a RAID configuration should be based upon how much money you could lose from non-availability of your systems per unit time. In a one person / one computer office you probably could get away with just using IDE drives and a tape backup ... Do the calculation ...... To restore the OS and application software and configurations from tape might take an hour for most users - excluding any large amount of data (100's GBytes). If you simply bought two or four 80 GByte IDE disks at about 120.00 or so each you would be far cheaper than the typical RAID Array and it is much simpler to simply replicate (out of the box functionality in Windows Servers) data between disks, or even just write a script to copy active data each day or each hour etc. IDE is fast enough for most uses. So, if you are down for an hour say, did you lose more than than the 1-2K for the minimum RAID array ? How often can a failure like this be this be expected ? For example, We have IDE drives that have been running 24 hours a day every day with fairly heavy IO and they typically do something like 2 years between failures ..... So the moral is dont overspend unless you know that an IDE system wont work due to access speed requirements or loss of business requirements dictating a fault tolerant configuration: fault tolerance costs $ in terms of equipment and personnel.
Excellent deciphering of the issue here. Really makes a tech smile when the basic issue can be addressed like this. Another solution would be to go to a light/medium weight server machine and turn it into a workstation. Base the setup on SCSI drives with hot swap capabilities. You've now also opened yourself up for advantages like multiple processors, massive amounts of RAM, multiple hot swap power supplies, etc. And if you are prudent, you can do all this at a reasonable cost. Especially if you look to corporate equipment coming off lease. It is usually very well taken care of. And generally not abused as companies generally maintain their equipment (like servers) extremely well. I couldn't have said it better. I second that motion!
Thanks again guys for the advice. A system builder out here in LA recommended a serverboard system w/ RAID array (stripe & mirror). I talked with a good computer shop (PC Club) and they split on this approach. Your responses have clearly removed any questions from my mind. RAID is too much for my setup (XP Pro, TS6/7, TradeStationFutures, TWS, thinkorswim's front end, Excel, Access (sometimes), Word (sometimes), IE, OutlookExpress). I'll probably be sucking it up until the new P4's with the 800Mhz buses are released in a few months and then go some P4 route.
AS Windows 2000 Workstation, XP Pro (and Home ed.) don't support native Raid software as Win 2000 Server, you will have to choose XP dotnet edition (server ed. of XP available since few weeks) for do that. But the both can support Raid hardware controller or onboard Raid controller without problem.