Hi Frank,
For speed and reliability, I would rate the RAID options as follows:
Firstly, a dedicated hardware card. This has the advantage that all the
processing is carried out on the board itself, but it has the disadvantage
that not all BIOSes can be set up to boot from such a device. Secondly, RAID
that is built-in to the motherboard. Although this option uses some processor
capacity, this has the great advantage of being bootable. Both these two
options may require drivers to be obtained if the Vista disk doesn't already
have the necessary drivers on it. Thirdly, Microsoft RAID. Although this is
the cheapest option, with it being built-in to the operating system, it is
also the least reliable. Because this option is totally software-based, it is
also the slowest and can also lead to a slow running system because of the
extra workload on the processor. My personal preference would be to use the
option of RAID that is built-in to the motherboard as this is the easiest to
set up. Although not as fast as a dedicated hardware card, it is cheaper and
is certainly alot faster than a purely software solution could be, and
without the disadvantage of using up a lot of processor time.
Dwarf