Ok. I have 2 Hard drives a 250GB SATA WD Cavier and a 500GB SATA Samsung. My questions are:

1) For RAID to work do the hard drives HAVE to be identical and if so to what point.
2) If it did work would I have to format both hard drives or could I simply link the partition of one to the entire next hard drive...
3) Can anyone just simplify this whole thing for me? LOL.

Thanks very much for any help.

BTW I apologize if this was discussed before I seem to had forgotten my forum manners and search...

First off - you need to tell us what kind of RAID you want and why. If you want RAID1 for redundancy, then the total size of the array will only be as large as the smallest drive in the array. In your case, it will end up being 250GB.

As for the second part of your question, Intel RAID controllers allow you to partition part of your drives and run part of them in RAID1 and part of them in RAID0. IIRC, the feature is called Intel Matrix RAID.

http://www.acnc.com/raid.html <-- one of the best resources on RAID.