[QUOTE] Yeah, sure. I dont doubt that it can be faster. But it's also true that they can be slower... when all the motherboards started coming out a while back with built in RAID controllers, people were going out and setting up their RAID arrays and thinking how much faster it would be... but those setups often just dont cut it (: They're OK for backup purposes I guess.[/QUOTE] I agree - RAID on the motherboard with no cache is a bad thing. In most cases they implemented a cheap RAID chipset and without the cache it's not much better than an OS RAID, but it does offer performance benefits. Most people don't understand RAID, they think that RAID is always faster than non-RAID, and that's just not always true. RAID 1 is almost as fast as a single drive for writes, but, can be faster than a single drive for reads since the data can be read from either drive. RAID 5 has poor write times, but great read times.... In most cases, for home users, and for people doing PS type work, a simple MIRROR will save their butts in case of a hardware failure, but that's about the only benefit - most of these users set the mirror up as one large mirror, then partition it, and still think it's two drives for purposes of swap/temp space... They should have installed a single drive as a drive for swap/temp space and then they would have seen a difference.