Why don't you guys believe him? It definitely is odd that he won't post a vid showing a cold boot in front of the tests but the COD4 loading time makes some sense. My guess is that it is well optimized and the requests are mainly sequential reads. Most games are not like this, but some are (I think crysis is like this too). My 2x X25-E load that level in ~2.8 seconds.

20 seconds @ 70MB/s read (7200rpm storage HDD)
2.8 seconds @ 470MB/s read (2x X25-E, very degraded)
1.5 seconds @ 750MB/s read (Napalm's setup)

Makes sense as the numbers roughly match up and there is always these small random differences system to system, especially when getting into loading times that are in the few second range and measuring with a stop watch. Has nothing to do with areca. Any raid card that can do 750mb/s sequentially should be able to do this for COD4. A third X25-E would get me to about 1.9-2.0 seconds and that is where ICH would max out.

By the way, if any of you guys are testing this without at least a 4Ghz Intel and some quick ram then I don't think you'll like what you will see. Your CPU is holding you back and you probably won't load that fast regardless of your storage speed. I did a quick test @ 3Ghz and it took like 5 seconds (my guess, I did not measure with a stop watch) to load versus the 2.8s @ 4.7ghz.

COD4 isn't a good test... The 100app test is much better, however it is also much more difficult to replicate on different systems. Someone make a list of 100 free apps that we could DL. These apps can't include anything that scans your hardware config (like 3dmarks) because that has nothing to do with speed and will just take different amounts of time depending on your hardware.