I'm looking to set up raid 1 on my gigabyte 965p-ds3 motherboard. I just want some redundancy, although I hear raid1 offers a little (~5%) extra performance too... is this true with on-board raid?

I've done a little research and people say that on-board raid is generally a no-no. Horror stories pop-up, where if the mobo breaks, you can't rebuild the array. But I think this is talking about raid0.

My main question is, if my mobo breaks, can I just drop the HD into another computer and it'll boot? Or will I run into problems?

Also, will I be able to set up dual boot windows/linux without too many problems? I get the impression I need to run some windows software (gigabyte raid manager) to get things set up.

Any comments/help greatly appreciated. Thanks

I would get a fast hard drive rather than RAID0. Check the hard disk charts.
Read here about the migration:

The Raid Migration Adventure

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 640-8.html

Thanks for the reply, but I want raid1, not raid0

RAID 1 carries less risk when run on a motherboard RAID controller than RAID 0 does. Further, the implementation of RAID 1 is usually such that the drives can be used outside the RAID 1 if it breaks. In other words, if your motherboard dies, you can generally take one of the drives of the RAID 1 and put it in another computer by itself, and read your data like normal.

Dual boot setup should be no problem. Once the RAID is defined in the BIOS RAID manager, the RAID appears as a single drive. You would then set up dual boot on the RAID just like you would set it up on a single drive.

Motherboard RAID 1 is not likely to get you any performance boost. You need a controller that has the capability to do smart interleaved reads and a pretty large read cache in order to boost performance under RAID 1.