Hey eveyone got a interesting question.....

I am upgrading my system tomorrow and need a little advice....

In my currant system I have 5 hard drives.

2x 80 gig Seagate SATAII drives ( RAID 0 ) C: Drive)

2x 250 gig WD SATA 150 drives (RAID 0 ) Media Storage)

1x 300 gig Maxtor SATAII SATdrive (System Backup)

As you can see I use the above 2x 80 gigs in the RAID 0 array for my system disk (Windows XP)

Sitting on my storage shelf I have a 74 gb WD Raptor drive that I was interested in using when I set my new system up tomorrow. However I wanted to know if I would notice any increased performance using the single Raptor drive for Windows over the SATAII RAID 0 Array......

Id prefer to keep using my two 80 gigs in RAID 0 but (being 2xtimes more space then the raptor) if the single Raptor will compliment my new Core 2 Duo E6600 and DDR800 better I will probably use it.

Any opinions would be great.....

Thanks in Advance. !!!!

Sort of depends on what the workload is coing to be. RAID0 will give you more throughput whereas the Raptor's superior seek times will win in random access and small transfers.

There's some interesting benhmarks here:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1746&page=1
For most workloads, the single Raptor outperforms or matches generic drives in RAID0.

I run Raptor single drive 74 gb and it was a night a day difference. Most newer systems the single most bottleneck is the hard drive as Cpu RAM and FSB has gotten so fast.

I also have another Raptor which I purchased to go RAID 0 with but havent got around to reformatting my system to include it.

In my opinion for gaming the only thing better then a raptor is 2 in raid 0

Also anybody out there know if you can go from 1 hard drive to raid 0 simply by copying the contents from drive 1 to drive 2 then setting up the motherboard bios for raid 0 or do I have to start fresh and format both drives? (I know they have to be identical)

I planned on doing the latter but If I can get away with copying the drive it would be a considerable shortcut.

Copying contents would only help in case of RAID 1.

You do not have to format though. You could just copy the contents of the first drive to a this one, then set up RAID0 and then copy the contents back to the RAID0 array. After that, either create new partitions or resize the existing one(s). Could be tricky with fakeraid - you pretty much need a decent OS (read: "not Windows") for this and fakeraid support in not-Windows is not so good.

Oh well. Just as well my knowledge of computers both harware and software is better then good but I have zero experience in the RAID department tried it many years ago I think when running Windows ME (may bill gates rot in hell for that particular nightmare OS) never bothered to try it until now (or shortly from now) when switching from IDE to Sata noticed big improvement and from SATA to Raptor HUGE difference so relishing the thought of 2 raptors in RAID 0.
The people who say NOT to run dual raptors are not so much saying it is not a good thing so much then it is an expensive alternative.

I Figure if you invest in a SLI board to run 2 7800 GTX video cards running 2 raptors is a small chunk to pay for the performance leap.

I run the 250 gb drives for STORAGE