So, my shiny new computer has built in SATA RAID, and I've got two SATA disks for it. My question: should I configure the two drives for striped (RAID0) operation, or as separate volumes?

I'm looking for performance, rather than reliability -- important information will be stored on a RAID5 array in another PC, which is backed up semi-regularly.

My expected usage will be gaming, Visual Studio 2005, and potentially Microsoft Virtual Server or VMWare.

I was going to opt for RAID0, for simplicity, but someone I was talking to yesterday said that this only makes streamed reads faster, and that I'd get better performance by putting the OS on C: and data and virtual hard-disk images on D:, where the drives can seek independently of each other.

Thoughts?

No exact experience, but I have some thoughts.

If you run two separate drives you run two separate file systems. I think that would be an advantage but I can't give a plausible reason why exactly.

Splitting things between the two separate drives is likely to give advantages if you say ran two virtual machines at once. In that case I'd keep one on each drive. I don't think generally putting the system on one and the virtual drives on another will make a lot of difference unless you are running low on RAM and the pagefile starts getting used a lot. In that case you have bigger (easy to solve) problems.

If you run striped RAID0, I think the main performance increase you will see is reading large continuous chunks of data. I don't think it helps seek times etc too much.

All my 2c

I don't know what O/S you plan on using, but with a good O/S and, say, a 128-256KB stripe size, the drives will frequently be sent off on separate file missions concurrently. This helps performance a fair bit.

Using separate JBOD drives is a manual attempt to do the same thing, except it requires lots of tuning by the user. RAID0 just achieves it automatically.

Cheers

I run a RAID0+1 at the office for a database intensive GIS application. It is considerably faster than the single drive system I had. My kid had a RAID0 set up with 2 of these. It was very fast until one of the drives cratered. If performance is your only concern, then go for the RAID0.