My old system used 2 seperate physical drives setup as seperate drives on seperate channels, which I always understood to be the most efficient way of doing it.

On my new system I have setup two 500Gb (7200rpm 16Mb cache)drives as a striped Raid 0 array i.e. functioning as one drive.

Question is.........would I be any better off having a single smaller faster (10,000rpm) for my system drive and using the striped 500's as the storage drives.

Not sure if the seperate physical drive/channel argument still holds true for SATA?

Raid 0 is really for temporary stuff as any problem with either drive means all data is lost. So don't put your operating system on a Raid 0 system. Have a smaller drive for the boot and program storage and use a backup program so that you could recover. I have a 120G boot, a 160G for temp files ( and also the backup image of the boot drive), 3 x 200G storage drives, also a couple of 250G USB drives that I sometimes use if needed. I have not seen the need for a Raid unless you are editing uncompressed video or lots of layers of HDV you probably don't need it either for speed or storage with modern drives.

Ron Evans