RAID, Overclocking, SSD drive: I don't understand these, need help!

I am new to building a gaming rig and plan to purchase a gaming laptop when the 7970 comes out late May. I have been looking on Xoticpc, Malibal, Mythlogic and other sites. There are 3 things that have me stuck though. The sites offer to set up a RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration, and I do plan on having an 120gb SSD as my main harddrive and a 750gb-1tb HDD as my second. Do I need to RAID configure this? I don't understand RAID at all. This laptop will be mostly for gaming (Dishonored, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, Fallout, Crysis...)

Xoticpc offers an option to overlock the system as well. I don't understand this either. Malibal does not have this option and I know it is obviously something I could do on my own...but I don't know how to do it or why I would do it (because I don't know what the benefits are).

Lastly, both Exoticpc and Malibal offer this set of options when building: Hard Drive 1, Hard Drive 2, MSATA SSD Drive. If I want one SSD and one HDD, is it okay to put the SSD as HD1 and the HDD as HD2 and not have anything checkmarked for the MSATA SSD slot? or is it best to put the SSD in that designated spot?

Sorry for all the very newbie questions, I just want to be able to maximize things. ALSO...I could save about $100 by buying my own 1tb harddrive and installing it myself, but I don't know if that would void my warranty with the company. The 2 computer I am looking at are Malibal's Satori and Xoticpc's Sager NP9170/Clevo P170EM.


and one final random question: where could I go to see the difference between Sager NP9170/Clevo P170EM in person?



Thank you all so much for any assistance!

 

RAID is only if you want to pair two hard drives.
For instance, you get two 128GB SSDs.
In RAID0, they combine into a single 256GB drive. The performance can be faster than a single drive since both drives are being used at the same time.

In RAID1, both drives have the exact same contents written to them so you would get 128GB of usable space. It's just in case one of the drives fails, so then you have a backup copy. Always good to have your own backup copy of your files somewhere though.

Overclocking lets you run a component in your computer faster than it's officially rated (you can get your computer to run a little faster than it usually would). It's up to you if you want to try this. In no way is it a necessity.

The mSATA slot is like an extra slot where you can install an SSD drive.

I'll leave the details to someone else.

 

Great! thank you. So, when you do a RAID 0 on 2 hard drives, and one is an SSD and the other an HDD, does it matter where you install programs or does it just automatically place the file somewhere since it is considered 1 drive?

In other words, would I be able to install my OS and most played games on the SSD portion of the HD and my files on the HDD portion?

For gaming, would a RAID0 be recommended?

 

You wouldn't do RAID on two different drives. The HDD would probably slow the SSD down (since the HDD and SSD are being used at the same time). You wouldn't be able to have a SSD portion and a HDD portion.

Without RAID, the HDD will just come up as a separate drive in My Computer which you can put things on.

It's up to you. The only thing that might be improved are loading times. A single SSD by itself should probably be enough.