Well my computer is set up with 2 old sata II hdd's in raid 0. It seems 1 of the 2 hdd is having problems so I guess I'm going to upgrade my motherboard and hdd at this time to sata III. As my computer is amd I will be ugrading to a sabertooth and WD 500gb blue for storage, I'm gonna pick up a ssd locally for my OS. I will continue using my Phenom II 965BE cpu for now until a new generation comes out as the bulldozer cpu's are crap, will also keep my nvidia 560ti oc as my main card but I'm going to throw an old 8800gts, that I have laying around, in as a physx card. My memory will stay the same as well as I have 12gb of ddr3 1600.
Thats nothing I lose a hard drive every year. Past 8 years I have lost 8 or 9 drives. HDD's are just not up to any kind of quality standard or will last with actual use these days. Could also be too much stress since the speeds going to the chipset are overclocked 20%, which I cant back off of since I need the additional graphics and SSD performance. A single 1TB hard drive will probably be almost as fast as your two old drives in RAID0. You also wont notice any speed difference going from SATA2 to SATA3 since mechanical drives cannot even max out a SATA1 connection yet. The sole reason for faster SATA connections is the use of solid state drives. Each port transfers at 6gb/s, it isnt shared. So while your HDD's will still transfer at whatever slow speed they always do, the SSD will be able to take full advantage of its speed. The only thing you ever have to worry about is usually the chipset is not capable of doing all 8 ports at max 6gb/s speeds, so dont try RAID0'ing 8 solid state drives as the speed will top out at 2GB/s, which is only 4 high-end SSD's now days. This limitation is because your southbridge chip uses 4 PCI-E 2.0 lanes, which the max theoretical bandwidth of is only 2GB/s each way. If you wish to increase the max transfer rates of your chipset then you will have to do what I am doing and overclock your PCI-Express speed. Default is 100MHz, and AHCI usually breaks over 120MHz. The benefits of an OC'ed PCI-E is additional GPU performance, increased SSD small random file performance, and increased total max transfer speeds to/from HDD and SSD. Issues from OC'ed PCI-E is possible data corruption on HDD/SDD if you dont bother checking for issues, and early failure of HDD's due to chipset stress. No matter what you do, I highly recommend a backup of your RAID array at a minimum of once per month. losing a drive will cause you to lose all data, and HDD's are way too fragile these days.
