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#11
You have at least two ways of producing a RAID array.
One of them is to use the RAID capabilities of your motherboard's SATA controller. (Incidentally, what is it?) My motherboard (see my system specs) has an Intel ICH10R controller. If the SATA controller is set to RAID in the BIOS settings, a menu becomes available to configure disks as arrays. (Multiple arrays can be created, but there are only 6 SATA ports on the ICH10R, so this is limited.) When a disk is added to the array, all of the data on the disk are lost. (I believe that no special preparation of the disk is required, as it's always wiped, in effect.)
If you install Win7 on a RAID array, you need to install the RAID drivers during the Windows installation. I don't know whether Win7 includes any RAID drivers, or whether you'll have to supply them on removable media. (XP required such drivers to be on a floppy. Vista improved that by allowing floppy, CD, or a USB flash drive. Win7 is the same as Vista in that regard.)
Win7 permits pure software RAID, which has the advantage of being independent of any controller hardware:
Information regarding Windows 7 software Raid : Alan's World Famous Blog V2
I've never used it. It's unclear to me whether Win7 can be used with software RAID on the OS drive.
You may wish to check whether the Velociraptors are ideal for your purpose. They are 10,000 RPM, and their seek times are good, but for continuous reads and writes, the higher platter densities of the large conventional drives (1-2TB) may give them competitive performance for video capture. (Plus larger capacity.)