Not bothered about reliability, looking at a very fast RAID 0 solution. Would the Samsung SpinPoint F1 320gb in a 3/4 drive RAID 0 configuration be any good? Or would it be better to have Seagate 7200.11s? WD Raptors too expensive, heard they can be outperformed by 2x single platter Seagates... SATA Controller is the onboard one on the Asus Maximus Extreme mobo.
"hard drive solution"? What's your problem As for RAID 0, what do you mean by fast? Do you want high throughput/Bandwidth (If so, why?) - or do you want low seek times? Do you want it so your games load fast, or are you needing SQL databases to be more responsive? Or are you editing very large videos and RAW pictures?
Just posting this because I have been looking. The fastest according to this: http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html?modelx=33&model1=117&model2=1047&chart=34 is the samsung spinpoint 1000GB next are the Seagate cudas at 750 and 500. Personally I would go for two 500GB cudas for RAID.
You don't seem to understand. All of the above costs £20,000. Pick what you need and you can get that down to sane money. What are you using the system for? Are you mostly gaming? Are you mostly editing videos or RAW photos from a DSLR? Tell us what you want to do and we can tell you what will actually serve you well and what's worth buying. Also, beware of RAID 0 - if you don't know the common reasons not to get it, then you shouldn't get it, basicly.
Basically you want any of the new >300gb platter drives. That's the samsung F1 320gb or the WD 320 or 640 drives (the 1TB F1 will blow your budget). I think 4 x F1 320 will cost you about £200 and should be fast. The WD are comparable price I believe but make sure you get the single platter version. Here's some results (someone else's) that compare the WD640s vs raptors 74s for 4 drive raid 0 config. This is fast!!!!!........ http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2822353&postcount=283
And this is why RAID 0 is a curse. So many noobs who don't understand the differences between bandwidth and seek time, nor either one's impact upon specific types of performance.
@specofdust: I was just posting some benchmarks because the OP asked specifically about a 4 x F1 320 raid 0 setup and I happened to have seen some recently. It's up to others to decide how a fast benchmark result translates to performance.
spot on - most just don't understand that uber bandwidth doesn't equate to uber real-world performance for most applications. To the OP though - if you do need high bandwidth (and know why), you would struggle to do better than four of the ~300GB single platter drives around now on your budget. The Samsung would get my top shout, the WD is just as good, the Seagate is pretty noisy in comparison.
