Setting Up RAID on my system

Hi, I am thinking of setting my system up to a RAID format, I have a single 1TB drive at present which is running well. I have just ordered 2 more identical drivess. Can I set up RAID without losing all my current data or do I have to do a reinstall of windows to get it all going. Also I want to try to get 2 of the drives working in raid 0 and the 3rd drive as a storage device for my personal files. Is this possible

If anyone can help I would appreciate it. I have never set up raid on a system before and really can't afford to lose the data I currently have stored

Thanks

What is your ultimate goal for installing RAID? If it's for data protection, you probably want RAID 1.

Read about RAID on Wiki. Then decide.

I have ordered 2 more 1TB drives so I was hoping to have my current drive and 1 other set in RAID 0 to increase the performance and have the 3rd drive as a standard storage drive

I don't see how RAID increases performance.

Striping, sort of, kind of doubles read/write speed. What exactly are you using your computer for? For the most part you don't need rappid I/O, you probably wont see a difference.

I'm personally not a huge fan of RAID-0 simply because if you lose one drive in the array you lose all data which would really suck. Personally I would take all three drives and create a RAID-5 array and then partition your drive into two partitions, one for the OS and one for data.

You will need to reinstall if you plan on implementing RAID.

thanks for the help everyone was looking to boost things like the boot up time etc. takes a while and none of that time is cpu as the usage stays below 10% but the hard drive light stays on solid.

Will look in to the raid 5.