hi,i didnt quiet understand your post,you said youre getting a raptor hdd soon and wanted to know about raid???drivers??is it sata or ata??
well raid(redundant array of inexpensive drives)is optional,you can put in as many drives as you like it (provided you have free ide/ata/sata cable)without using raid.raid can be of two types software and hardware,there are raid cards that fit in pci slot some mobos have it onboard as well.there are many variatio of raid most popular that i know is raid 1 and 0 or raid 10,one focuses on mirroring a drive for security(makes a copy of everything on the other hdd)and other is striping(devides the data between the 2 drives so a very fast transfer speed is achieved).raid 10 is a collection of both these types but is expensive and requires a lot of space.one downside is that when you use a drive in raid config some size of hdd gets blocked around 10-15gb on higher models to store algorithms and can never be retrieved.well that pretty much explaind raid there are many other variation of raid but most of them focus on error correction and security.there are other alternatives to raid(speedwise) with 10,000 rpm drives and ncq(native command queing)the difference isnt that much.
about drivers well drivers are only required for raid devices like the raid pci card or onboard raid (which comes in its cd)win xp doesnt require any drivers for a new hdd just plug it in and use it(plug and play),one thing that you might want to check though is the jumper settings on the hdd see that no 2 drives on the system are set at master or slave which causes a conflict and the pc doesnt recognises them.hope this explaind something.good luck
