2, 4 or 6?

Looking into finally pieceing my new pc together now DX10 cards and vista are on the scene properly, probably getting an n680 sli motherboard which has the 6 sata2 ports, i generally crunch my hard drives alot with various tasks and desperatly miss my old 4x cheetah 15k raid0 setup. Was wondering how big the bandwidth is on the sata bus on the n680 and therefore be worth getting 2 4 or 6 drives? Im not a big fan of being safe so they would be in raid 0 just was wondering about the performance increase between each step obviously 2 is better than 1, on my old system when i swapped from 2 cheetahs to 4 there was a noticeable difference.

Just wondered what peoples views were, im leaning towards 4 740adfd drives atm.

Zanai said:

i generally crunch my hard drives alot with various tasks and desperatly miss my old 4x cheetah 15k raid0 setup.

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I dont blame you, those must have been insanely fast, although with noise to match

I dont think you'd be dissapointed by 4 raptors in RAID0 and I cant imagine you'd saturate the sata bus of any modern motherboards with four hard drives, even if they are raptors. If manufacturers offer 4 hdd raid solutions, then they would offer the bandwidth to take advantage of it.

I'm sure someone more knowledgable than me will be along shortly to confirm this

noise wasnt a problem had em screwed in on rubber washers in a coolermaster case (stops case vibration) just 2 120mm fans infront of em

next question is the jump from 2 to 4 or 4 to 6 worth it?

I've read articles in the past that claim RAID0 has no place in the desktop PC. I dont agree entirely with them, but I do agree with the ones that argue more than 4 drives in a RAID0 array gains no real world performance increase.

RAID has no place on the desktop

edit: just noticed you're from yorkshire, nice to see another UKer

sorry im a RAID0 fan ... buts that mainly due to the fact i do alot of encoding/decoding ... whether or not raid0 is worth the money for your game loading 10 seconds quicker thats upto you lol

went from doing video editing on a 40gb ata133 drive to a single 40gb sata maxtor drive (one of the first ever released) to 2x sata drives in raid0 to new pc entirly and 2x cheetahs then 4x cheetahs can tell you every step was a significate performance increase basically i knew my scsi raid card could handle 4 drives very well just considering the money i paid for that and then suddenly your getting 4+ way raid controller built in for free makes me question the quality of the controller ... and therefore im wondering whether to just go for 2, or if its still a reasonable boost going to 4 then 6 when heavy I/O read write tasks are occuring?