Markish..
I have no idea what you know about raid 0. The posters here prolly know more than I, but I will offer my layman's terms & info for you.
Nutshell.. Raid 0 basically takes a given portion of data, and splits it into pieces, part onto each drive in the raid array. It give a performance increase for sure, but not in effect of twice as fast.
Most boards I have used or setup with Raid 0 have integrated chips, which typically do not offer the performance of a dedicated card.
It is also worth noting that early SATA drives were sometimes P-ATA drives with a converter for serial, meaning you may not be any faster than standard ATA. It would seem that a true (or have heard called Native) SATA drives are SCSI drives with SATA interface. This is just what I have read from different places, so don't flame me for repeating.
My experience with Raid 0 has been this..
A new, 8mb cache 7200 rpm ATA-100 hdd, can sustain on a new mobo with new cpu, writes of around 85, reads around 75. A new SATA 150 hdd, same board/cpu, can sustain writes around 100, reads around 85. New SATA 150 hdds, RAID 0, typically sustains 125 writes & 100 reads. This is largely dependent of course on the drive & the Raid controller. The VIA 8237 chip has offered my pretty good performance in the past, usually better than the Sil or Nvidia chips. However, the Nforce4 chip I am happy to say gives me slightly faster r/w's, with a little more cpu use though.
I have been building some Core2 Duo's on the ICH7 (intel) chip controllers, and have seen some really really great results using some Raptor 150's in Raid 0. They definately put the 7200 models to a lower level. It is also interesting to note, that from my experiences, the 3gb type SATA drives do not necessarily perform better than 150's. Using Raptor 75's is still better than SATA 7200rpm, but the Raptor 150's are better.
My take on the whole thing, having played with servers & desktops using both ATA, SCSI & SATA, having both integrated controllers as well as dedicated cards?
You gain approximately 25% more by using Raid 0. I care not to comment about whether Raid 0 is the fastest or not, as that seems to have been covered already
Of course, after you digest what Raid 0 does, and figure out after some testing how much it give YOU in performace, you can then dive into the whole Stripe Size to Cluster Size debate. Let me just say, that with enough reformatting and reinstalling, you CAN see some very noticable differences between them.
later.