Also, Tusken,
If you want to continue playing devils advocate, try a couple of the things I mentioned earlier in the thread: regular every-day little things like opening a directory with 12GB of 630MB vid files and seeing how long it takes to generate thumbnails for them. Try opening a 6GB photoshop file...while running bit torrent, running a virus scan, and creating a drive image.
Something I should have driven home earlier is that there is this overly prevalent notion of posting numbers from "real world apps benchmarks" which is flawed in that the testers so often try really, really hard to make these measurements "pure"; to isolate them from other influences. That's fine and dandy if it's PART of a larger data set, and presumably more science-y (science-ish?) sounding, but you should take the words "real world" right the **** out of the description because I don't know anyone not responsible for predicting the weather who computes in a bubble running just one app. How are such "real world" app benchmarking suits so different from any other "synthetic" measurement when you're running it and ONLY it alongside the (maybe 5?) other processes Windows absolutely
needs to run? -- I've got four cores and four hard drives and consider it a moral imperative that they be occupied...if only to justify the time, effort and money I've lavished on my box without feeling entirely embarrassed by the UV-lit, LED-encrusted, black monolith sitting proudly atop my home theater equipment tower...<sigh> at least I retain enough self-respect and perspective to have avoided giving it a girls name or something...not one I'd share with anyone...I digress...
And, before it's said, no, RAID, even properly short-stroked RAID is not THE killer mod for every game which was the emphasis the OP had. But, we're not console 'tards...we do other things with our computers where a nice RAID-0 can matter a lot more. Let's be honest here: you're not wanking it to the poorly-rendered orc avatar controlled by your World-of-Warcraft girlfriend; hell no! The
WoW client's in the background while you're watching 20-second
WMV clips of naked Japanese school-girls beating each other with wiffle-bats, hoping the questionable
website(s?) you're on isn't introducing new viruses your
AV scanner can't detect through as-yet-un-patched holes in your
firewall program the new version of which your
ftp client is still downloading, because your
bit-torrent client finally found some high-bandwidth peers for the full 5-seasons of <insert random pirated anime> which is causing the naked japanese girl clips to stutter, and then a all-finished DING!!! from either
dvd shrink or
autogk goes off
really loud because you turned off dynamic range compression in your
audio-synth console making it frustraingly difficult to cum before the suspicion that your iGF whom you suspect won't get on a
web cam because her voice on
teamspeak sounds suspiciously like an obese 45-year-old house-wife or a dude with a
voice modulator >>that sick ******* would be who I play in this long-winded scenario, btw<<
recording your voice with in-game footage via
Frapzbecause it'd be just so-damned funny to convert in
Premiere and post to YouTube...causes your "run on sentence" to go limp. I think I'm thoroughly done amazing myself with the cleverawesomtude of my writing...if anyone's actually read this, I suspect they get the point: it's a multitasking world and RAID STR bandwidth is your friend.
Finally, try short-stroking your RAID from within the controller BIOS where you assign drives and create the volume, NOT through the OS and I bet you'll see an effect better than just doing RAID...Not Jesus giving you a back-rub better, but...better.