I hear people talking a lot about setting up their hard drives in various RAID configurations, and I'm curious about the benefits. From what I've gathered so far, it can make data transfer faster/more error proof? Am I way off base with that, and how would you do it?

RAID-0 is entirely different from all the other setups; it doesn't provide any redundancy whatsoever, and is only interesting from a performance standpoint. I haven't played with it; I can't provide any information.

Other than that, RAID provides some sort of data redundancy--some assurance that some hardware can fail without you losing anything. It's by no means any sort of replacement for regular backups, but in situations where rebuilding systems after equipment failure is expensive, it's a useful added layer of protection.

The big choice on implementation is generally between hardware and software setups. Most OSes have some sort of software RAID implementation; whether it sucks or not varies. As far as hardware goes, it varies by producer. If your operating system choice isn't nailed down, I'd recommend looking at software RAID in OpenBSD or Opensolaris (via ZFS). Otherwise, google around and see what comes up in terms of hardware. Or just skip it entirely--a lot of the time, it's a much better idea to buy a USB hard drive and use it to back up important things.

Yeah, RAID 0 - a striped array where you combine two hard drives to use as one hard drive. Faster but not safe.

RAID 1 - mirrored array - using two drives as one. It's actually slower but it's safe because the same data gets written to two drives.

RAID 5 - Just like RAID 0 but requires a third drive to act as a parity drive which can be used to restore any lost data if one of the other two data drives fail.

Not sure about the other types of RAID arrays but they're not as popular and usually are just expansions on the main concepts behind these three. Like you can stripe two drives and then mirror them with two more to make a RAID 0+1 array or something like that.

And all the hard drives that you use in a RAID array have to be identical to each other.