I have 3 500GByte SEAGATES and 1 SAMSUNG 500GByte, I want to build a
4 Disk Array, RAID 0 and 1, striped and mirorred.

First question, if the HD has (about) the same build; Cylinders; Heads; Cache and RPM, can I use these.
This would give me a 2x 500GByte storage, maybe not ideal for a BOOT Device, also
quite big.
(A SSD is, now a days, probably, cheaper and easier in both setup and use
and maintenance!)

So, would it be a good idea, afterall, or better forget about this and go for the SSD and use the RAID for (safe) storage?

Crunchers using RAID, both soft-ware and hard-ware, what are your experiences?

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First question, if the HD has (about) the same build; Cylinders; Heads; Cache and RPM, can I use these.

You should be able to use it, if you use hardware always look for bios/firmware/driver updates.

This would give me a 2x 500GByte storage, maybe not ideal for a BOOT Device, also
quite big.

You will see a single 1 TB Disk, if you think it's too big you can do patitions on top to organize storage. 1 TB of storage i think it's a normal disk size for actual PCs.

(A SSD is, now a days, probably, cheaper and easier in both setup and use
and maintenance!)

A SSD of 1 TB in size is very expensive in comparison to your hard disk configuration, a good 500GB HD it's about 35€, a 500GB SSD it's about 800€ or more!

Reliability of SSD's is an issue, because this is a very new kind of product. There are problems with the build in memory controlers, just right now there is a call back by a big SSD-Vendor.

What Windows OS do you use?

SSD's need special otions to avoid problems.
They are build on flash memory cells which can be written only a 1000 times, so the memory controler has to spread the write commands across the disk, to guaratee the lifetime of each memory cell on the SSD.
You shouln'd do defrags on a SSD, and there are problems with hiberation and cache files which should be displaced to a non SSD.
Win7 is partialy aware and turns of defragmentation if you connect an SSD. Older Win OS's do not and you can easyly kill your SSD with defrag.

A combination of a small affordable SSD and HD's is actual the best thing to do. The new Z68 chipset contains funtions which supports a special combination of a small SSD for speeding and regular HD's for storage and reliability.

A RAID 0+1 is nuch more fault tolerant as a single SSD, if you lose one HD you can continue to work and order a new HD, if you lose a single SDD you got noting but your backup, bertter you should build a RAID 1 using 2 SSD's blowing up the price. SSD or not, always have a good backup!!!

I personally use a RAID 1 build of 2*2TB HD's for System and a RAID 5 build of 4*2TB HD's for data storage both on hardware controllers. AND some extermal USB-HD's for backup. OK, this is overkill for crunching, but the System is also used for other things than seti ;-).

If you only want to build cruncher a RAID 1 containing 2*500GB HD's would be very sufficient.

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