I have a hardware RAID card arriving in the next few hours which is for the 4 WD RE3 1TB drives I bought last week. They'll be going into RAID5. I'll probably buy another Vertex drive and whack that on there too. I noticed better performance on a hybrid (cheap) RAID card, the 1430SA than I did on the motherboard. I've also noticed that people running 2 or 3 Vertex drives on RAID seem to get better performance than just double the single drive performance on the low numbers on ATTO. I suspect this is somewhat down to cache, but maybe also down to the drives supporting RAID but not AHCI. I don't expect to see spectacular gains under RAID0, but I think there will be gains. 60GB is just a little too small for an OS drive though. Currently I've got less than 30GB, but as I add apps and games etc it'll get very close to 60GB, and I'd rather have plenty of space.

As for performance degradation, I've noticed my write speeds had gone down from about 150MB/sec to around 110MB/sec after I had installed stuff to take it up to 40GB - I was really just filling the drive up. Repeating the same benchmark didn't decrease the write speeds, but that may have been because I hadn't written to the whole drive by that point. I probably have now. I've cleared stuff back down and I'll see if the performance stays the same or goes back up - and as I type ATTO is running, I'm capping out at 120MB/sec on writes, reads are unaffected.

A guy from PerfectDisk has been on the OCZ forums talking about defragging, and Tony has mentioned (but avoided any detail) some kind of OCZ software to enhance performance. It would seem to me that what we want is some kind of defragmentation/maintenance routine that erases any areas of the disk that the OS has marked as deleted. I think that'll come in the near future, either through third party defrag tools or through OCZ. Even with performance degraded though the results are better with the new firmware on an OS drive than they were with the old firmware on an empty non-OS drive.