Wanting to get a RAID card

I want to get a RAID card or just get more HDDs on my comp without spending a lot.

I went to newegg and came across these two items:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16815124001

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16816124001

One is "non-raid," I googled and got no clear cut answer.
If someone could explain the differeces that would be most helpful.

If anyone could post cost effective solutions to add more than the typical 2 HDDs. I have 2 HDDs lying around from a friend who says that they like crash on him every week. You can reformat them and stuff and put OSs on em, but he says that die in a week and you gotta reformat em. So I have em and If i were able to use them that would be great!

Thanks!

If you have a server OS (WinXX server) or Linux/BSD and a decent computer spec, you might want to consider just getting a non-raid card to add the extra IDE interfaces and then run software raid.  The benefit of this is that if for whatever reason your cheapo IDE card dies, you can still access the data on your raided drives with another computer.

>>1
non-raid means that the card doesn't come with any raid abilities built in.  in other words, it'll allow you to add new hard drives to your system that will act like hard drives normally do.  the raid card will allow you to link the extra hard drives together into a raid.  in other words, it'll allow you to add new hard drives to your system that can be combined to act like a single hard drive.

until you buy an expensive raid card it'll be all software, because you have to install "drivers" for them, which implent the raid-feature. you can, however just use the built-in sw-raid of windows. i don't know exactly how to setup it, but i know i saw it some time ago (unter administrative tools afair).

You need to read up on RAID types to see if you actually need the capabilities, but from the sound of it, you just want to add more storage.  RAID is essentially a way of configuring drives to give either a speed increase (create a 'super disk out of more than one physical drive), or fault-tolerance to your system so that a failed drive doesn't lose you data (which of course means you 'lose' some of the HDs storage due to data duplication - how much depends on which RAID configuration you're using).  Given that you're scratching around putting old busted HDs into your system, the cost of a real RAID card of any capability would probably exceed the value of all the HDs you have anyway.

check ebay for old ide paddleboards