Advice on upgrade, HDD bottleneck?

Yes, I had considered this, but with everyone claiming the increased failure rate of HDD in Raid 0 and the non-redundancy of data, this option makes me a bit nervous. I am by no means paranoid about losing my data, as I never back anything up, but the velociraptor just seems so much simpler and safe. I know the price per gigabyte is much higher on the veloci's but I'd use my 500gb as storage. Don't get me wrong, I love performance, but not at the cost of ease of mind.

Raid 0 problems are more rare than you may think.
And those to drives in raid will out preform the raptor in every way.
If your looking for an upgrade id say get a sound card, but that's just me.

IMHO 2x640 raid-0 is the way to go. Then quad if you would utilize it.

But with your setup, I wouldn't be in any rush.

Coming from someone with Raptor X's in raid 0 I'd say it's not worth the cost. I wish I had just gotten some real nice 7200 RPM drives and put them in a raid 0 array. The Raptors while giving great performance are pretty expensive for the relatively low amount of space you get, and after running a single drive and raid 0 with these drives it's hard for me to tell people to run out and buy them unless price is not important at all.

Thanks for the info everyone, I guess my next question would be: would if behoove me to buy 2 smaller and lower cost 7200 rpm drives and put them in raid 0 for OS and applications, and use a larger hd for data storage? This way I'd have my data on a more secure drive and my os and apps on the fast raid array at a lower cost then 2 large drives in raid 0 array.

Does this make sense?

thanks!

I agree. If you want to upgrade hdd's, get some wd 640's. IMO, raptors are a waste of money for the room/performance per $$.

I guess my final question would be: if I am worried about data loss, should I buy 2 smaller 7200 rpm hdd for the raid 0 for OS and games, and 1 large drive for data storage?

In this scenario, my data is a bit more secure, I'd get the performance of raid 0, and it would cost less. Does this make sense?

I would get the 640's and another 500gb or 1tb drive for back-up. The chance of the drives failing is not that great, but one thing to keep in mind is the controller can fail too. If that happens, you can't access the files on the array without that same controller.

I run 2 small drives (will be getting 2 640's myself ion a week or so) I find that I back up certain files (music, movies etc.) There is no need to make sure you can back-up the entire array, just get another drive that is big enough for your really important items. I have had a mobo fail on me twice and the first time I couldn't get at any of my files and it was a pita. After that, I use my server drives to back-up the important things.

Looks like i'll give Raid 0 a try. Thanks everyone!