An external hard drive at least 1.5 times the capacity of the array, plus a copy of a cloning utility that will support RAID 0 is the best bet.

I assume you want raid 0 striped for disc performance? When you say back up system you mean back up data?, or an image of the hard drives for the purposes of a disk failure? If it is recovery from a disc failure in raid 0 the easy choice is an Image backup or the drives with 3rd party software below.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/             read the user guide pdf on how it works. Very powerful.

If you just want to back up files you can just use an external usb drive and backup software.

More reading here, it is best to understand all the raid configuations available and what they do

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/index.htm

 

 

Thanks ! Yes I want to be able to image the disk. And data! I have ghost 2006,and go back but it dosent support raid . I touched on the raid 0+1., but Im not sure if the 8400 will accept it, thanks for the links ill start reading. deweeks

I have already purchased two wd caviliers se 16 s , they will be connected at sata level 150 ms . i think i can increase my ram from 1gig too four gig and not use raid and have just as good results? please comment if you have time or if im wrong thanks again deweeks

When you set up a raid0 it is seen as one drive by windows or any other software, as only the raid chipset sees it as 2 drives. So when you use backup software it will only see 1 large drive. All the work is done by the chipset hardware and therefore the software has no clue it is a raid0 config. My setup is 2 250gb WD drives but are seen by windows as 1 500gb drive. Acronis is smart and when it makes the image, the file it creates will be smaller than all the actual data on the drive because of the compression it uses . For example if you do a properties on your C drive and it says there is 10.9 gigs of data on it but it is a 200 gig drive, Acronis will create and image file smaller than 10.9 gigs. How large the external drive needs to be depends on how much data you have, not how big the drive is that you are backing up, make sense? Also Acronis can do incremental back ups which means you do the first image backup, then you can set Acronis to append that image with only the data that has either changed or has been added.  Really nice feature. Be sure to read the Acronis documentation before using the software, There are a few posts here that say that Acronis is no good, but it is because the software is powerful and they took no time to read and understand how to use it. There is no other software out there that I know of that even comes close to Aconis, I am dreading the Day when they sell out to some huge company like Micro$oft.