I agree it's the best bang for the buck right now but personally, I'd prefer the newer Crucial M4 or Corsair Force 3. They work wonders on Intel onboard SATA3 (P67 / Z68 motherboards).
It shouldn't hurt read performance that much and if both plexes are placed on identical drives it shouldn't even hurt write performance that much either. Anyway, though, the performance hit is also one of the reasons why I recommended mirroring only a portion of the RAID 0 array. That way, the non mirrored portion will not suffer from this at all. So if you want the added data security and at the same time still enjoy the best performance also, you could choose to not mirror the fastest performing (outermost) zones of the RAID 0 array. Like I said, to get even better performance I recommend DiskTrix Ultimate Defrag to manually place the files that you want to perform the fastest, onto the fastest zones of the non mirrored volume. This of course only applies to harddisks and not SSDs because on an SSD all zones perform the same. If you're unsure about the choice of volume sizes you can always simply resize them afterwards, using Acronis Disk Director Suite or GParted Live, or similar software. Robocopy is fine for copying files but someone mentioned in another thread a while ago that TeraCopy is considerably faster. It used to be buggy on Windows 7 at the time but v2.2 is out now, it's pretty cool stuff TBH. File copying tasks (amoung other types of background tasks) tend to hog system resources, so that's why I also mentioned Process Lasso BTW.
Raid 0 me I use a very expensive RAID 0 setup. I mainly benefit from this is several ways 1 much faster game load time 2 way faster DVD / BLURAY and CD ripping 3 file transfer I have been using R0 for many years and have a basic guideline 1, NO ONBOARD CONTROLLERs or SOFTWARE RAID 2 Only using enterprise level WD RAPTOR HDD's (my preference) 3 WEEKLY ISO image backup of R0 array to secondary storage drive To me the cost vs capacity vs performance is heavily in favor of traditional HDD setups. The cost vs capacity of SSD is a no brainer... and I could afford them if I wanted to. I get EXCELLENT performance and capacity with my RAID 0 array HDD's. I advise against it unless your able to afford a quality CONTROLLER and HDD setup.
If the controller card fails, you're dealing with the added risk of not finding a compatible replacement card / being stuck with unaccessible data until the replacement card arrives. With Windows 7 software mirroring (and striping), all it takes to access the data is a working Windows 7 machine. On top of that, since Windows 7 software RAID supports duplexing, it's possible to combine two RAID controller cards for even better performance as well as for improved reliability (if one of both controller cards fails, the other one continues to function normally. Also, with a decent motherboard at least, onboard RAID on the Intel ports is reliable and relatively fast. One can argue that the high end RAID controller cards have a capacitor / battery to prevent data loss in the event of a power / mains failure but then again, data not yet written to the card will still be lost so an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) pretty much reduces the usefullness of the capacitor / battery on the card to almost zero anyway IMO. Last but not least, a decent SATA3 RAID controller card cannot be had for less than $300 USD (normal price) so quite frankly, I'm going to have to say that you have no idea what you are talking about. Personal preference will always be personal preference I guess. Personally, I believe that, at least in most scenarios, a multi-tiered storage solution based around cheaper harddisks, high system memory capacity (Dataram RAMDisk software), SSD and the use of symbolic links turns out being much more cost effective. The first thing I usually do each time I encounter an .iso file is curse out loud a couple times and then extract it using WinRAR. lol I can think of only one reason why I would want to create an .iso file and that's to play a full Blu ray movie from my harddisk in PowerDVD, using Elaborate Bytes Virtual CloneDrive. Try the boot CD of Acronis True Image 2011 to make incremental images of your storage volumes.
Well My computer KICKS THE **** out of your computer obviously, so whatever.............."MUTTON" :flip2:
