I know the basics of setting up a RAID, but was curious about somthing i read saying the harddrives need to be blank before you set it up, is this true

Hi Lazy,

Welcome to The {CHF.

I must say that in my experience the drive doesn't have to be blank in order to RAID it, generally (in Hardware RAID) when you build the RAID you can choose to blank the lot or keep the source and build from that (especially RAID1 Mirror) and then it starts building the RAID. Through the Windows disk management you might have to format the disk, convert it to dynamic and the RAID it.
Hope that helps