Hard drive questions

What is the difference between Sata Sata 2 and Sata3gb/s? How do these relate to the old school IDE drives, and what is an Ultra IDE? I want to buy some hard drives off of newegg and I don't know what to get.

Also, I don't know what RAID is. I've lost data in the past, and have heard that Raid is a good way to prevent that. What do I need to do? And what do I need to know? Tell me all the dirt on hard drives and Raid!

 

Tell us what motherboard you have, then we can be more helpful regarding the hard drive types.

Regarding data protection via RAID, you'll most likely want a RAID 1 configuration. It mirrors two drives so that, if one fails, all your data is still on the other one. See All about RAID for more info.

 

ASUS Striker extreme

 

and your link for the all about raid thing just makes me post another reply. Could you try to send me another link that works correctly?

 

IDE is an old format that's a bit slow. SATA replaced it with 1.5gb/s speeds. SATA II replaced SATA with 3.0gb/s speeds. SATA II drives will typically work on SATA I motherboards, they'll just run at the SATA I speeds.

Here is a site that has some basic info on RAID.
http://www.computerhope.com/help/raid.htm