Fast reliable disk?

[ChrisLX200]

Sustained transfers are faster in RAID, no doubt about it. It's not a simple equation to work out overall beneift though, a lot depends on what you do with your machine.

For a number of years I ran a 4-drive 0+1 RAID but then came the realisation that for most of the time 2 of those drives were not doing much, and that a mirror is not actually as good protection as a regular backup. In the end I dismantled it.

4x37GB Raptors would be a lot of noise and a lot of heat for only 74GB usable space.

 

[Dunky]

Benefit from RAID depends on strip size. Small stripe sizes means faster Windows loading times but larger stripe sizes mean better sustained transfer. So although there's benefit, there's still a bit of trade off between different stripe sizes.