setting the drives up in a stripe RAID would be an utter waste. you'd essentially reduce the total capacity from 320GB to 240GB.

That is an excellent conquest though, grats

oh, and on the sound card you might try out drivers from m-audio's Revolution 5.1 sound card series, they are based on the Envy24 chipset. you can find the latest driver for it here. Its from 2005, but it worked for me up until i upgraded to leopard in my digital audio.