Will this hardrive setup provide extra performance?

[clocker]

I-Ram is as fast as its bottleneck. SATA 150.

This is only partially true.
Actually, it's totally true but doesn't really explain the difference.
The i-RAM has no seek delay and does not slow down like a regular HDD does at the end of the disk.
It's throughput is almost dead constant, a result only approached by a RAID 0 array.

It is noticably faster than my Raptors in RAID and that's saying something.

Yes, it is absurdly expensive though.

Oh well.

[Wolfmight]

I've decided to go with a single 10,000rpm raptor for now. 74GB. WD740ADFD Raptor appears to outperform my current drive by 50%+ in the benchmark tests I've seen on various websites. (ran benchmark tests on drives to check. My system had a similar set-up, being in a good range to compare) I may buy another 74gb when I rack up the money and link em up in Raid0 for an added boost. 10,000rpm SATA150 should prove to cut my rendering times down significantly...can't wait to pop that baby in.
What would you say the percent of speed increase is from having dual raptors in Raid0? 20% or 30% of a gain in speed?

Newegg also had the 37gb raptor for $120, but it was "Open Box". Didn't want to risk getting burnt toast.

Update! I've found a peice of software that does the same thing I-Ram does, using your current ram. It's called "Virtual Drive", by farestone. Source

It runs data in your current systems RAM in a tiny virtual hardrive. I configured a 200mb Virtual Drive and installed Firefox within. I also moved the cache locations for both Internet Explorer and Firefox into the Virtual Drive. Definately a noticeable different in page rendering times! Cached webpages flash open. Firefox opens in a snap. I believe Firefox already stored recent pages in RAM, but this solutions stores em all in the RAM. Sweet Stuff here. Make sure you've got atleast 1gb of RAM before you grab this though.

Not exactly the same as I-Ram, but it's a start. I-Ram holds your whole OS and everything, but this program can make a few things run just as fast. Have fun.

If your a rich bastard, your still better off with I-Ram. 4GB of SUPER SPEED is the best of the best for now.

[Duffman]

I like the idea of having the operating system seperate from storage space and all but I've had lots of problems with it. When installing programs, they all default install to the drive with os, and I could not use adobe encore because it would not copy files anywhere but c:\, if there is a way around that shit, let me know.

[bigdawgfoxx]

I have a 160 gig split up as 20 for c and 140 for d(storage), but itd be awesome to have a nice raptor as c and the 160 as storage.

[Wolfmight]

I like the idea of having the operating system seperate from storage space and all but I've had lots of problems with it. When installing programs, they all default install to the drive with os, and I could not use adobe encore because it would not copy files anywhere but c:\, if there is a way around that shit, let me know.

Here's how to change it:

1. Navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
2. Find ProgramFilesDir whose default should be C:\Program Files
3. Change this to whatever directory you wish. I changed it to D:\Program Files for example.