HElp with raid

I just had my first gaming PC built for me, theHDD is 1TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 64MB Cache 7200RPM. My question is this: If in the future I decide I want more performance can I buy another drive and upgrade to RAID 0 without alot of speacial equipment?

And if so, how would I go about doing it. Does the computer recognixe this as two seperate drive? (ie a c:\ and D:\ drive or is it one in the same?

It will be one logical drive. You set it up in Bios. You can't just add a second drive later. You'd need to reformat both drives to create the raid set and then reinstall from scratch, or create a mirror of your first HD and restore from that onto the raid volume once its created.

thanks a lot man.

You can software RAID it very easily in Windows 7 now. Its actually better and obviously more portable than any onboard systems, unless you get a separate RAID controller which is always best.

But like any RAID system you're best to have some sort of backup. RAID 5 I think is proving to be pointless these days so you might be better buying 3 more drives and going RAID 10.

I was just at the nVidia conference and someone from Los Alamos National Labs was experimenting with RAID 60 using CUDA and getting huge performance boosts, even after losing a drive, thanks to linear algebra boost he was getting.

There are very different kinds of RAID.