Planning dual boot - Ubuntu + Win7

[st4rdust]

Been wanting to make this upgrade for a while now but I want to get all the details hammered out, there are a few areas that I'm not quite certain about. Right now I am running 4 640gb HDDs in a RAID 0+1 (two drive stripe, other two mirror the stripe). I will be ditching this for a plain and simple RAID 0 for pure performance. I have everything necessary backed up on an external drive so if one of the drives in my RAID 0 goes down, it won't be hurting me. I'd prefer to trade in redundancy for the added performance.

Anyway, if I format all the drives and set up the RAID 0 from the motherboard's software controller, what is the best way to set up the dual-boot for Windows 7 and Ubuntu? I'm considering using the GRUB boot loader to facilitate this setup. Let's say Ubuntu gets installed on the new RAID 0 and I install GRUB from there. Are there any compatibility issues waiting to bite me in the ass here? Is GRUB even necessary for this type of setup? While I'm familiar with Windows and Linux, I have no experience with GRUB so I can't be sure.

If for some reason there is a compatibility conflict, one alternate scenario I've thought of involves breaking up my drives into two sets of RAID 0 stripes, using one for Linux and one for Windows. In this case of two seperate RAIDs, I'm not sure how GRUB would fit into the situation or if it would be possible to control two seperate RAID sets with GRUB. I'm hoping someone with a better grasp of this stuff than I can school me on the right way to go. Thanks in advance!

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[deslok]

Normally dual booting windows (any version) and ubuntu requires paritioning the drives with a raid-0 that can be messy. yes if you plan to use this kind of setup you need grub or some equally capable boot loader normally the install procedure is to install windows first in one partiton then install linux which will overwrite the windows bootloader with grub if you allow it. at this point you can add the windows partion to the grub menu.
Depending on why you want both windows and linux i would like to alternativly point you either at virtual machines(which i can explain if need be) or Wubi(which you can find information on here (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WubiGuide)