X25-M vs (2) X25-M RAID 0

[Griff805]

I am reconfiguring my system and figured I'd get some "real world" differences between a single X25-M and 2 X25-M in RAID 0. If you're interested, below are the results.

Windows 7 Installation process:
I used a 16GB SSD drive that I have to install windows 7 from USB.
I removed anything from my system that was not necessary. I only had a monitor, USB keyboard and mouse connected. I disconnected the CD-ROM drive and any spare hard drives. BIOS options were for the most part, default settings. I just disabled the floppy drive and disabled any kind of ASUS features that I never use anyway.

Hard drives were installed in RAID mode both during single and dual drive setups. For single drive tests, the second drive was disconnected. I ran HDDERASE on each drive before install. Firmware is the updated firmware from Intel on both drives.

After Windows 7 was installed. The only things I did were to disable page file, and turned off "Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device". For dual drive setup, I installed matrix manager and enabled write-back cache, since that is how the drives would be used in a typical setup. I didn't install any drivers, as Windows 7 had drivers for everything in my system and they seemed to work fine.

The timer started right as I clicked the Next button to continue to the next step of "Copying Windows Files". It ended when I saw the network connection status change to "connected" on the taskbar. I subtracted the time during any kind of installation questions during first windows startup. There was only about 10-30 seconds worth of installation questions.

For the Applications-
I installed them in the same order and in the exact same way for both configurations. All programs except Adobe CS4 were installed from an image on a secondary hard drive that was installed after windows install. Only Adobe CS4 was installed and extracted from the main drive/drives.

Alright, if you have any questions, let me know. Extract from these results what you will.. I have my opinions about RAID-0 for SSD vs a single SSD. I'll leave it up to you guys to make your opinions. I didn't not run these tests more than once each time. I did not have the time to do this, but I think a single run should be sufficient for the purpose of this thread. By the way- Application load times were within .1 seconds of eachother for the most part, so it really wasn't worth creating a graph for that.

System
Q9450 @ 2.6 (stock)
ASUS P5Q-Pro (ICH10R is the controller used)
8GB DDR2
4870X2