A Question!
 

I've been thinking of installing Xp onto a 8g thumb drive which I can find for $60
A 16 for around $150

My question is, would it be possible to raid 2 thumb drives into one?

In theory it should, thumb drives are detected by windows as removable media in much the same ways as the drives in a raid array. You would have to use a software array manager though as i'm pretty sure there isn't a bios around that supports USB Raid. Wether windows would allow you to boot from the array is doubtful, until windows boots and loads the raid software i *think* it would be seen as a 2 seperate drives. Were you thinking of running a raid-0 or raid-1 array?

I've been going over which raid I'd use, and I just don't know but...
But I'm leaning toward using Raid-0, but I also don't need/know if it will help.
I don't think I'll need the extra speed/performance it would give. I mean
this would in essence be a solid state hard-drive. How much more performance
would I need?

If it's a flash drive then i doubt you will get any performance increase. I have several flash drives here ranging from 128mb to 2 gig, all USB 2, and i find that datatransfer to, from and between the devices is slower than my SATA 1 hard drives. Remember that the data transfer rates quoted on the box are usually only reproduceable in a lab :D

My childhood friend bought a brand new computer a few months ago, liquid cooled, SCSI the whole nines... He uses his SCSI as a boot drive and get just amazing download speeds off of cable internet (high speed "i" the package from shaw) Is that power from the drive its self, or rather from the connection?

SCSI drives have amazing data read and write capabilities, this is usually because of the fact that the drives run at around 10,000 RPM as compared to around 7,200 of an IDE or SATA drive. It was predicted that with the advent of UDMA 100, and above, that SCSI would would become obsolete. I don't see them so often in home computers any more but i still come across a lot the workplace, in my opinion they out-perform SATA drives hands down. It's probably a combination of both high speed cable and SCSI drives that give your friend his amazing speeds though :)

What's his connection speed?