Do You Need RAID? I Don't.
I don't like RAID. The system I'm trying out, a Systemax Venture VX, is a good machine, with an Intel Core2 Duo E6700. The downside is it came with a pair of 250GB drives merged together using RAID 0 (also known as striped). The downside of RAID is that if one drive hits the dust and stops working, there's no access to either drive.
You say you don't know hay about RAID? The quickest way to get a handle on it is to look at this neat bottled water analogy site that explains all versions of RAID. (You can use what you now know about RAID as an ice breaker at dinner parties. "Hey," you might say, "did you ever realize Striped RAID is a lot like stacking two water bottles on top of each other?" Lemme know if it gets you anywhere.)
Striped RAID, aka RAID 0
You might be curious and want the nitty-gritty about the other types of RAID arrays, so take a look at How to Set Up RAID on Your PC by PC World's RAID and hardware expert Kirk Steers. (Try and stay awake as you read it, willya?)
Getting Rid of RAID
I poked around the Web, my source for seemingly everything -- except removing RAID. Oh, sure, I learned that I could format over the drives, but I was looking for a way to move the data from the striped RAID array to a new, single drive on the same PC.
It turned out I had the program that would do the dirty work, and I'd been using it for backing up for the last few years. It's the cloning tool built into Acronis True Image 10 Home and it did the job in no time.
All I did was install the new, Seagate SATA drive into the PC, boot up the system and load Acronis, click Clone, and carefully go through the steps, pointing out the from and to drives. I rebooted when Acronis told me to and the system came to life on the new drive. I removed the RAID drives and disabled the RAID controller on the system board, which is easier than, say, making a decent macaroni and cheese dish. (Why disable it? I didn't want to see the RAID controller trying to find the drives each time I booted.)
If you don't have RAID on your PC, I can't think of many good reasons to install it. (I can see the RAID experts opening their e-mail programs...) And if you have RAID and want to dump it, now you know how.
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If you could have reconfigured it to a RAID-5 then if one drive failed you could just replace the bad drive and all your info would still exist. But I agree raids aren't really necessary.
This quite a biased opinion. Only covering one RAID setup that actually isn't RAID. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives. Well striping is not "Redundant." Mirroring on the other hand is and is quite useful, if a harddrive fails. So if one drive does "hit the dust" all of the data is on the other drive. No data loss. RAID is great if you do not use a program to back things up or if you want to save everything on your HD. Some people use the same drive partitioned to backup, which is useless if the drive fails. You be the judge.
Stay objective.