Harddrive RPM and RAID

[Uber_Gamer]

On my motherboard, am I capable of running more than 2 hard drives in a RAID 0 array?
And also would two 7200 rpm drives in essence be one drive running 14400 rpm?
And finally would 2 7200 rpm drives in a RAID 0 run faster than a 10k rpm drive?

[Spartan]

Two HDD's in Raid won't equal 14k rpm and I doubt they will be faster than a 10k. Depending on who you believe you will see between a 5-15% increase in speed. For regular home use or gaming computer I doubt you will see enough of an improvement to feel the money was well spent. You will see improvements in benchmarks but not really in day to day use. If you want it for the cool factor then go for it. If you want it for making movies at home go for it. If you have a job or hobby that requires manipulating large amounts of data go for it. Otherwise I'd probably pick something else to add or mod.

-Spartan

[Uber_Gamer]

Thank you for the very concise response. Lol, it annoys me when people respond with something other than the answer to my question. Anyway... Would I notice a significant difference with a 10k Raptor drive in things like loading and opening stuff, and benchmarking?

[Spartan]

Now the Raptors are a different story. I personally am sold on them and any computer I build in the future will have a Raptor (or it's then modern counterpart) in it. I didn't record any before and after times, but everything just feels much faster. The only thing I really timed is the time it tok to load Windows XP. It took me 14 minutes to completely load XP on a single Raptor, then I put two of them in Raid 0 and it took 12 minutes. Thats why I said earlier that you won't get double the performance. I like the Raptors, they aren't magic but they are fast.

-Spartan

[glc]

No, RAID 0 is only 2 drives. If you want speed and redundancy and have 3 or more drives, that's what RAID 5 is for - which is the only RAID I'll ever use.

[Spartan]

Well you can use more than two drives in Raid 0 (your mobo may or may not support this) and in theory the array gets faster as you add more drives. glc has a point however that there is no data redundancy so you have to be careful with your backups.
I have Raid 0 and Raid 1 arrays set up and my next foray into Raid will be Raid 5.

-Spartan