Well,
the board with the RAID has more than just RAID on board. It has SATA and FireWire. If you want FireWire that would be the board to get since it's built in.

If you don't need it get the regular P4PE.

The RAID on that board isn't that good and I wouldn't use RAID for your OS drive TBH

Opus :D

but what is FIREWIRE and what is RAID?

As long as your not running a 50 channels DAW you will be fine with normal IDE anyway :)

Raid is when you use multiple hd's simultaniously. Either to make simultanious copy's of data (safety) or by splitting the data onto the multiple hd's (faster write/read).

But normal IDE is more then fast enough for most applications.

Oh, and firewire is just as USB but only much faster. It's a protocol which is much used on the Mac and also on the pc (but not as much). USB 2.0 is more used on the pc.

Ummm, hate to say it but I've had projects as a test that were about 100 tracks and ran fine off of the IDE drive!

You don't need RAID for that or SCSI for that matter.

Also, FireWire 1394a is not faster than USB 2.0!
1394b is, in fact I just ordered a PCI 1394b card!! Need to find the cables now that will allow me to run it from my server in to my living room! hee hee

Opus

have you guys ever heard of fiberdrive? they're external hard drives that run off of fiber optic cables. supposedly they work great with nuendo.