What do I find? If I want to upgrade now, I need to replace my s@#!*y new(ish) 6800 with a PCI-E card. WHY!? AGP has suddenly become obsolete.
Better yet, pretty much everything you have is obsolete now if you want a fairly high-end system.
- PCI-E instead of AGP, so a new video card.
- DDR2 / DDR3 memory instead of the original DDR (not compatible, runs at a different voltage)
- SATA harddrive(s) instead of ATA/E-IDE
- Depending on how current/fast your old system is, you may also need a new powersupply to provide enough juice for your new components
I repeat: Raid is not slow!
Depending on the RAID configuration that you pick, it can be significantly faster than non-RAID... in some modes you only have to read/write half the data to each individual drive, and that happens simultaneously.... RAID 5 will write at about the same speed as a single drive (since it has to generate the CRC data while writing), but reads a lot faster than from a single drive... The only 'waste' is that you use up one drive for parity info rather than usable data, so using 3 drives gives you the usable diskspace of 2 drives.
But a catastrophical drive failure won't be any problem whatsoever, just plop in a replacement drive and it will automagically rebuild all your precious data... And until you get the replacement drive in, you can still continue to run on the remaining two drives without really noticing any thing. (of course, you won't be protected in case another drive burns up before your replacement comes in)