4-way RAID 0 "should" be faster, but best to do a quick compare maybe with the E; set them up for RAID 0 with 2 disks vs 3 disks vs 4 disks vs 1 disk (no raid)

also, use different apps to test (sisoft sandra also for example). also if you do a quick format, remember that the OS will format the drive sector first time there is data written to it... so performance is not very correct with the extra formatting overhead. for the read speed this can matter also.

with HDTach you can do write tests (in the reg version) to unformatted volumes, try that.

READ speed with RAID-0 is not very very fast compared to single drive AFAIk, it's the write speed which is much better.

read speed for the first RAID-0 2 disk array is great, that the Intel raid one right?

the second array on the SiliconImage is faster than a single SP2504C which only scores about ~57Mb/s in single drive mode; so you do gain a bit here at ~76Mb/s

that's quite an increase indeed, check also that average read speed, impressive!

what mobo is that koensa? ;)

how is your CPU cooled?

If you mirror, no data will be split. Mirroring can only be done using 2 drives. Striping splits the data and puts it on 2 drives.
The only (common) RAID arrays that support 3 drivers is RAID5 and JBOD.

I would never recommend RAID 0 unless you are 100% sure that loosing any of the data on that array is "okay" and "acceptable".

Only few, expensive RAID controllers have "array expansion". This is mostly in a RAID 5 array....

didn't you backup on another disk????

I try to keep 3 different backup copies of important data, at least:)