Dual 500GB disks? Meh. Wake me up when you switch that crap for 2 x 256GB Samsung 256GB SSD on RAID0 for the OS / VM / Sins / other apps, plus 2 x 2TB HD for storage.
Core i7 is a great platform though, congrats to you
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In theory Raid0 would be less safe, but with all the abstraction of actual physical addresses on flash, There is no such thing as 'bad blocks' , corruption is only likely if you have problematic software. If you ever hit bad blocks on a SSD, it's end-of-life for it anyway, you should replace is because the write cycles are all running out. should take quite a few years for that to hit though.
But current system's bottleneck is the storage part of the equation, you will still drag the system if the disks are slow. I bet you got high quality parts, even if they are 'just' 500GB each. From what I have read, those Samsung SSD are really good, head and shoulders above anything else (even the intel ones).
Although you may want to wait till Year's end or 2010, cause SSD will get cheaper fast.
[begindaydreaming]
My personal hunch is that they will be able to saturate SATA2 300MBps speed next year. SATA3 ups the limit to 600MBps, and is expected to be finalized at this year's second half. With Any luck, next year we will also see SATA3 SSD breaking the 300MBps barrier.
And you will have to buy a PCI Express SATA3 controller for your wonderful rig, to take advantage of all this newfound speed...
[/quitsdaydreaming]
If you look at the higher-end HDD parts (SATA, not SCSI), you will find that they are also making speed progresses with perpendicular recording. The latest 2TB disks pack quite a punch. If you simply don't want your chkdsk to take forever, you can use a technique of using a small partition at the outer end of the disk surface and leaving the rest unallocated. Being the fastest part of the disk, and having the reading arm travel faster can get you 10-20% more performance, at the expense of storage space. Plus the pragmatic bonus of faster disaster-recovery.