Thinking of adding another WD Raptor 150gb for Raid 0

Yeah, your board can do RAID-0. I'm not sure if your board has a dedicated controller chip like mine, but if it does, use that for RAID-0. Since it's dedicated to that, the theory is that it's safer for data protection. It would be called something like Jmicron or Silicon Image somewhere in your bios. If it doesn't have either of those, you can still do it on the southbridge. When you are posting the board, do CTRL-I and it will bring you into the ICH9R RAID controller where you can configure the drives.

As for performance, It does make a notable difference. I only have my games installed on my raptors since there's not fault tolerance and the risk of data corruption is substantially higher than with a standard single drive or RAID-1 (which is mirrored drives). It's pretty cool, because I'm usually the first one loaded up in servers and can get prime pick of the red team. lol.

Unfortunately the P35-DS3L only has the ICH9 Southbridge and not the ICH9R which supports RAID. So the answer is to buy a RAID controller card.

Here is the P35-DS3L (rev 2.0) product page:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/...ProductID=2629

oh ok, sorry for the misinformation there. I was under the false impression that all p35's had ich9r.

thanks for the info. +rep

I would oppose the RAID choice as the benefits aren't that great compared to the cost of running ($125 HDD + $50+ RAID card for 150GB more). A single 1TB or 1.5TB for $120/$180 would be better I think.

Yeah the gain will be minimal at best. Id go with option B.
For reference: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/394

I have 2 74gb raptors in raid 0 and honestly i dont think its much faster. And according to anandtech.com they have an article stating that in real world desktop performance its just the same but ill win u any benchmark ratings. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...px?i=2101&p=11