Velociraptor Drives, by Western Digital.

Wow, SATA 300 drives, 10k rpm's, NCQ, and much more. I have bought 4 now, and a RAID controller to see how well they did.  I spent too much for all of them from Newegg.  My RAID controller is a Highpoint 3520, capable of running 4 drives on a RAID-0 array.  I  added drives to test OCE, or Online-Capacity-Expansion from the controller. The OCE worked well and was easy to do.  I went from a 2 drive RAID-0 to a 4 drive RAID-0.  I have also short-stroke partitioned the array, hopefully to get another 20% speed increase.  Short-stroking means I only use the 1st 1.3 of the drive, so on a 300GB drive I would only partition the 1st 100GB, and leave off the remaining 200GB.  I know, what a waste in the name of performance...

I am going to post the screens from HD Tune and HD Tach, but basically I get between 150MB/s and 180MB/s.  I wonder, where is the SATA 300 marks?  I think this goes to what I have heard, the interface kinda caps out around 150MB/s.  The cool thing about this though, my minimum is 150MB/s, so I never go slower than that from what the synthetic benchmarks says.  What do I think... Vista is not slow because of disk access.

Here are my benchmarks from HD Tune and HD Tach: