RAID questions

[jcmkk]

I know the basics of RAID and am not gonna try not to ask any stupid questions that can be answered with a little research. I really want to get a little extra hard drive performance out of the new system that I'm planning to build. First off, what kind of real world performance should I expect? 5 or 10 seconds less for UT to load up? Would a RAID setup be faster than a WD Special Edition hard drive? My uncle has one of those hard drives and it didn't seem any faster than my current IBM. Do all onboard RAID setups suffer from a slow boot time? I know the Gigabyte and Soyo motherboards are known for slow boot up times with RAID onboard. If not all do, which ones still boot at fastest? I'm looking for a KT333 motherboard so their KT266A counterparts should offer very similar RAID performance. Last question: Which hard drives should I use for a RAID setup, I'm planning on using two 40GB HDs. I've heard that the Seagates don't work well with some controllers because of their fast access time. The new Maxtors seem like their access time is even faster, so they wouldn't work well either. This leaves me with WD if the fast access time problem is true. Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[Shockwave]

I'm not a RAID smee guru, and I wont pretend to be, but, I would imagine the improvements you would notice you be minimal. As for access time problems, I'm not familiar with any, but I'm a bit out of date on that issue. Generally, faser is better, regardless of the setup

 

[jrini]

One of the systems I am working with uses an ABIT ST6 Raid (High Point 370) with four 90 Gig Maxtor hard drives. They are presently in a RAID 0+1 configuration and working perfectly.
No Problem with access time.
Before we set up the 0+1 configuration, we tried the striping only configuration.
Wheew! it was obviously faster than a single drive.
But it is not my machine so I did not get any bench marks.