2x raptors worth it?

[xxaaqq]

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However, I should also note that it's a truely rare occasion when the hard disk is the bottleneck for a system. (Average desktop usage)...

In this thread or another, I have up my HDTach with a single Raptor (80GB OEM version). And HDTach has "average results" built in that you can check out, too. RAID 0 lines are very uneven. I checked out the 7200.7 RAID 0 line, and it was just a little higher than the single Raptor line at times, but also dropped very low, very often.

Anyway, I quoted that line of yours because I'm not sure what you include in "average". I have 1GB of memory... and at times I know it is my bottleneck, because sometimes I open 50+ 2MB digital photos, and once the physical memory is used up, that memory bottleneck becomes a hard drive bottleneck. But I don't suppose this is average. But it's not uncommon, either. Also, I have a digital camcorder, and when I first got it, the system I had then would drop frames during the copy to the hard drive. With the 7200.7 RAID 0 and the Raptor, that hasn't been a problem.

Anyway, it is my subjective opinion that the single Raptor feels faster than my previous 7200.7 RAID 0 setup. I also don't have freezes during HL2 loading screens any more...