74gb Raptor Or RAID ?

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.