[Beavis68]

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How much faster are the RAID 10,000 rpm drives than the standard 7200 rpm ones (seagate, etc.)? Is it worth paying the extra money and sacrificing hard drive space?

I will be mainly using it for poker, surfing the net, and watching porn.

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RAID is not a type of drive, RAID is a type of hard drive control.

There are two typical methods of setting up RAID, RAID 0 and RAID 1, RAID 0 splits the data between two or more drives and eliminates or reduces the lag time of the read/write head moving to a new location to read data. This is known as striping.

RAID 1 is know are "mirrored" and creates a second image of the first drive on the second for protection against HDD failure. There is also RAID 10 or 0+1 which combines the two but requires 4 HDDs.

There is a RAID 5 which adds a parity bit check and requires 3 HDDs.

I have heard that a 7,200 RAID 0 system performs as well a 10,000 RPM standard setup, but I havent seen any benchmarks.