There was a similar post recently, and many people provided ideas. Follow this link:
http://forums.macnn.com/65/mac-pro-a...ernal-hds-mac/
For external SATA the card and wiring is called "eSATA". Some RAID cards are for internal drives only and would be called "SATA."
As for your idea of booting from an external RAID, you have to carefully research the RAID cards that you are going to use, because many of them do not allow booting. I have booted from an internal 2-drive RAID 1 (OS X software RAID) in a Mac Pro, and a multi-disk RAID 0 (OS X software RAID). I was going to get a RAID card, but there are lots of little issues and lots of expense.
A general tip on drives: you need to have a backup of everything you do. This means that if you have 3 TB in your computer and a 1TB external, then you would either need to buy more external storage or use one of your internal drives as a backup for one of the other internal drives (just don't drop your computer into a 50-gallon drum of maple syrup and ruin all your internal drives). You could choose to do this by putting your two 1TB drives into a software RAID 1.
One tip that might not be obvious: If you decide to put all of your drives in some type of RAID (0 or 1), then you would need to physically insert a single, bootable drive to apply firmware updates for a Mac Pro. It sounds like you have enough disks so that you could format one and put it aside for emergency booting (and physically insert it when needed).
A firewire drive for backup will work, but I hope you have an idea of how long it will take you to backup your files. For a student, this is probably a decent solution. The next solution would be to get an external RAID 0 that is the same size as all of your internal drives. Then you could put your two 1TB into RAID 0, your Caviar and Megadisk into another RAID 0 (by partitioning a 250GB partition on your Megadisk and using the other 750GB as an extra backup area)--or use the external RAID 0 as primary and the internal drives as backup. This would probably be overkill for a student.
Here is a low-cost idea:
1) boot from a single 250GB drive
2) make a 1.5TB RAID 0 from the two 500GB drives and a 500GB partition from a 1TB drive. I have done similar things with my drives.
3) buy an SATA enclosure for your other 1TB drive and use that as an additional backup. I have one of these (Antec Veris MX-1 Actively Cooled Hard Drive Enclosure) that has both USB and eSATA and a fan. If you do get a RAID card, then you could connect it via the eSATA connection:
Antec - Veris USB 2.0/eSATA Hard Drive Enclosure for 3.5" SATA Hard Drives - MX-1
4) use the 2nd partition of the 1TB internal drive as a mirror for your boot drive. I would NOT make at a RAID 1 with your boot drive because it would ruin the performance of your RAID 0. You can use Disk Utility to initialize it as a clone of your boot drive (and you can boot from it using by holding the option key when you boot and select that drive). You can also choose to physically swap your other 250B and format it with that image as an emergency boot drive.
5) if you have extra drives, you could temporarily swap them with your boot drive, boot from the clone on your RAID 0, then copy your most important files and keep those drives at gramma's house so that your are protected from catastrophe.
NOTE ABOUT THE VERIS HARD DRIVE ENCLOSURE: the directions are vague. If you get one, ask me to post a picture of the little wire that you have to unplug (or see if I already posted it by searching this forum from Google with something like "Antec hard drive enclosure site:forums.macnn.com" without the quotes). The diagram lied, and if you try to unplug the wire following the directions you might break it. I installed the hard drive without unplugging the wire and then realized how it worked.
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