Resetting a computer with RAID card

[Asplanchna]

Hello,
I have a MacPro with 4 1TB drives and a RAID card. Under Disk Utility, each drive is listed as a RAID drive; drive #1 is also the startup drive. For background, I purchased this computer with the idea that it would be used for some extensive databasing and would require RAID as a means of protecting the data. However, the computer is no longer used for that purpose (just used as a standard work computer). I have no experience with RAID sets, and am wondering how others might set up their system?

 

[eric2006]

The basic raid setups are striped, mirrored and concatenated.
Striped (RAID 0) increases performance by spreading data across drives. (If one drives fails, you lose all your data)
Mirrored (RAID 1) increases redundancy by cloning a drive, so that if one drive fails, you still have a working drive
Concatenated (JBOD) drives will just fill up normally but then overflow into the next drive. They appear as one large volume.

There are more setups available, such as hybrids of the above setups. These are the basic RAIDS supported by OS X in software, but your RAID card will likely support other setups (Hardware RAID).