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My dream of mega-fast storage for my primary machine was realized not too long ago. It was so fast, I had to upgrade my CPU to keep up with it. I was confident my storage speed was cutting edge until I installed a Seagate Barracuda drive into my media machine today. I of course immediately ran a benchmark comparison and discovered the single new drive had a higher burst speed than my dual-drive RAID. This was not surprising since the new drive was SATA/300 vs. the SATA/150 WD Raptor drives in my RAID, so the bus capacity between processor and the new drive was double that between processor and my RAID drives. For burst speeds at least, 7,200RPM really is faster than 10,000RPM if it's stuck on a SATA/150 short bus. However, since I don't access files sequentially on my hard drive, the higher random access should net me better real-world performance. Interpreting the results this way also enables me to adjust reality back to the belief that my RAID is a mega-fast storage device unparalleled by any non-SCSI setups. The transitive property wins again!