I have Striped Drives...is that bad?

Hey...thanks for the quick reply. To give you some history, I had a buddy build me this computer a couple years ago and he striped the drives ( I guess to make things faster). So there are 2 hard drives, plus my external hd. Does striped mean that if I lose one hard drive I lose both?

Last night I tried to boot my computer up and it worked, then as I was navigating Symantec and simultaneously fiddling with my External Drive (Maxtor 500GB) the computer froze...so I turned the power off and tried to reboot, and now I'm back to square one because it stops again at "Detecting Array"....
I can't figure out why it booted up just fine last night. The only thing I did was let it sit for a day or so. Everything appeared to be normal when it booted back up.

Any thoughts? Thanks