RAID 0 is the performance side of the house. RAID 0 or "striping" uses two drives in conjunction with one other for speed. Data is divided when it is written to both drives so that the workload is balanced and thus more efficient. The data is broken up into chunks or stripes when it is alternatingly stored. There is no redundancy of data with RAID 0. You should be using two identical drives if you are setting up a RAID 0 but this is not required. Two different drives can be used but at a small cost. Keeping in mind that the workload is being balanced, the computer sets the drives up to be equal. If you have an 80 and a 120 gb drive, RAID 0 will have your machine treat them as two 80 gb drives, ignoring the extra 40 gb of space on drive two.
The benefits of RAID 1 are obvious but those of RAID 0 are understandable but not exactly clear. If you are like me you are asking yourself about now, how much of a performance boost do I get by striping my drives? If an effort to answer this in the most practical of ways, we took a machine we just finished testing with built on an AOpen AK86-L board and altered it by adding in an identical hard drive, formatting the system and setting it up in RAID 0 trim.
The tests we reran are: SiSoft Sandra 2004 Pro, Business Winstone 2004, Content Creation 2004, Code Creatures, Comanche 4, AquaMark 3, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, Unreal Tournament 2003, Quake III and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Checkpoint Demo). All synthetic and gaming benchmarks were patched with the most recent updates available at the time of this writing. Our aim here is to give you some idea of how much performance there is to be had here. All game tests were run at 1024x768 resolution. The Hard|OCP's UT2003 benchmarking program and the Guru3D's Quake III benchmarking program were used in measuring. All tests are the result of five runs per bench with the highest and lowest scores being thrown out. The remaining three scores are averaged and that is what you see here.
Test Bed
AMD Athlon 64 3000
AOpen AK86-L mainboard
Thermaltake K8 Silent Boost Cooler
Maxtor Diamond Max 9 SATA 80gb HDD
Corsair XMS3500 DDR (x2)
VisionTek Radeon 9800 XT
Generic CD-ROM
Windows XP Professional with all patches and service packs installed.
Results
With the workloads balanced between the two disks, Sandra 2004 Pro's File System Bench was no surprise to us at all.
Prices quoted in above post include shipping??Even if they don't I can still get the the ATI X1950 Pro and still be below the $1,500.00 
Prices quoted in above post include shipping??Even if they don't I can still get the the ATI X1950 Pro and still be below the $1,500.00 
PM me your address and shirt size (S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL) and the shirt is yours. I'll have to check with Boyd's and see if they have hats. 
I guess I'll be putting a PC together soon. BTW this info comes with a lifetime tech support warranty right?? 
Prices quoted in above post include shipping??Even if they don't I can still get the the ATI X1950 Pro and still be below the $1,500.00 
s. I use overclock.net personally, and the PSU I have listed in my specs above is great at 580W and rock solid according to many reviews. Add in that it is modular and 
