raid o

i take it when it comes to hard drives raid o gives a performance boost.also you would only need 2 80g drives,any recommendations on fast hard drives whats at the top

 

Raid 0 gives little performance boost and if you lose one drive you lose everything heres a nice article using two of arguably the fastest drives available

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

load and seek times wont be improved transfer of large files should be though

 

There are benefits if you video/audio transfer or work with large files. The concept if you loose one raid drive you loose it all is a little misleading (ie what happens if the one drive you are working on goes bad? If it is not backed up you loose the data.) Same thing on two drives that are actually one drive under raid 0. Of course you have the probability that one of the two drives may fail vs just one drive, but really just back up which you should do anyway. I have always run raid 0 and never have had a drive fail within and also outside the drives indicated lifespan. YET

The Raptors are fast and SCSI has some new 80gig drives but they are expensive