Multi-HD vs FILE Configuration

[IanB]

Yep me too, I'd set up the O.S. on one and configure the remaining space between the two as a striped vol. (mirrored would only provide fault tolerance). I would put the page file and as many apps as I could on the striped one.

You defeat the value of the Raptors that way. The benefit of having a separate drive for each "function", such as OS, apps, pagefile etc., is that the drives can seek for data concurrently and stream data in parallel. That way the perceived access time and streaming speed is improved for the end user.

If you put the OS on one disk, leaving some space spare, and then stripe the remaining space with apps and other frequently accessed data like a pagefile, you now have the drive seeking two or three parts of the disk at the same time if it gets a request for app data and OS data and pagefile data, pretty typical in normal usage like loading an app. This means the heads are all over the disk surface and your seek times crash, massively affecting the perceived disk response. Also, you are now streaming two or three data blocks through a single physical disk interface, so instead of getting the best speed that disk can offer for one of the streams, you get a half or a third for all.

If you must use the remaining partition so as not to waste space, then probably best is to mirror instead and only place there archive data, that's being rarely accessed. That way there's little or no regular contention with the OS data access and you don't lose speed where you need it most. This is where Matrix RAID, or a similar controller function, works well - place a small fast striped partition or mirror at the drive start to maximise the regular seek times for OS or apps by short-stroking the drive, then put infrequently accessed data in the remaining space, RAIDed or not, so it doesn't conflict all the time. Using it for anything else will just waste your effort.