What sort of performance boost with IDE RAID?

[Hoppster]

Gidday

Contemplating adding a PCI - IDE Raid controller to my PC.
As I can obtain a HDD identical to the one in it.

Couple of questions
Will this improove hard drive performance much?
Will the computer boot from the controller and not the onboard IDE ?
I assume the card will come with instructions for this.

Also, are there any good guides on this site or net?

Any help, most appreciated.

[Áedán]

It will improve sustained transfer rates, but that might not be a large performance boost for you, depending on what you do.

In terms of booting from the array, you'd need a card that comes with it's own BIOS. If the card doesn't come with it's own BIOS, then there's no chance of getting your system to boot from it. As to the card, it may or may not come with instructions... I assume you have a motherboard that doesn't have any RAID support on it?

Also, as you're changing the boot device, there's a possibility you might need to re-install Windows too.

[Hoppster]

I only really do gaming, HL2, CS Source etc. It performs OK.
Might leave it as is for now, thanks for the help.