Ok... a couple of Numpty questions...

[Grey M@a]

I would agree with unreal, i moved from a western digital hard drive to a maxtor drive and its pants in comparison, yes they are silent but they are slower than the WD drives. If you really want to push out the boat on a raid get two 74gb western digital raptors

[Rys]

I really hope you're recommending RAID1 there for those disproportionally expensive disks? RAID0 is a mugs game.

There's nothing wrong with Maxtor's latest HDDs, as technically competent sites like Storage Review will show you. I personally run Maxtor DiamonMax 10 disks with no complaints.

The reality is that modern HDDs are rarely slow or incredibly noisy and that purchasing on £/GB is often a fine way to do it, matching your budget.

[TooNice]

I agree with Nox. If you are thinking of RAID-0, then you need to consider that only a handful of applications would benefit from it. Windows XP will load almost twice as fast, your synthetic bench will look good, and I vaguely remember that video editing benefits from it too. On the down side, if one drive dies, you can more or less say bye bye to your data.

RAID-1 mirrors the data written on the second drive. Nice but perhaps unecessary if you to keep backup of what your most important data.

RAID (0+1, or 1+0) is probably out of the question for you, in light of the number of drives needed.

Other RAID options, (aside from 1 and maybe 0+1) are probably not built into your mobo RAID controller.

My view? Unless you really care about the applications I mentioned which uses RAID-0, just forget about it. Get a good and fast drive like the Raptor, and if you need more storage (you might not), then get a large 7200RPM drive. Actually, some 7200RPM drives are pretty good too even as a main drive.
I personally recommend the Hitachi T7k250 (or the 7k250 if you do not have SATA) though according to the Storagereview, the Maxtor Maxline III is every bit as good .
The Western Digital Caviar series (their high performance 7200RPM) is starting to show its age, although it is still solid.

Check out the performance database there: http://www.storagereview.com/php/ben...1=262&devCnt=2

Lets you pick and match like this:

http://www.storagereview.com/php/ben...3=280&devCnt=4