How to reconfigure the RAID settings on a Maxtor OneTouch III

I haven't tried FW800 specifically but we use a lot of OSX-RAID1 on internal drives and i used it once on FW400.

You just have to create a mirrored disk set from the external disks in DiskUtility. You should use the whole disks and let DiskUtility do the partitioning. That makes it easier to rebuild and boot off the set.

You can also start out with data already on one disk, then create a degraded set on a second disk, copy everything over and integrate the first disk into the set but this requires some non-supported use of command-line diskutil. The same goes for creating partitions on the RAID set or creating a RAID out of partitions. (All of which is perfectly normal and handy on e.g. Linux)

Well you already have a pretty optimal setup. Having the two disks in RAID-0 as your boot drive gives you the greatest possible performance. Just be sure to keep a good backup, since if either disk fails you lose the whole array. Superduper! is great since it makes a bootable backup for you, unlike Time Machine. I highly recommend it.

Otherwise you're good to go. The only suggestions I have are to buy an SSD for even more performance, and to upgrade your graphics card, you can get a PC 5770 or something for really cheap and it works great.