RAID 0 with Firewire 800?

[annaks]

Will I get any speed increase in Lightroom/Photoshop if I use RAID 0 with FireWire 800?
If so, what RAID chunk size should I set if I am mostly working with photo files of 30-42MB?

Three months ago, I bought two OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 with hardware RAID settings Span, 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD/Independent drive modes. I inserted 8 X 2TB Toshiba (by Hitachi) 7200RPM SATA 3.0 HDD, and have one spare. One of the Pro Qx2s I will use for backup, and I have four 3TB HDs to rotate for offsite storage. My 2009 iMac is old, I know.

This ex-film photographer's head has been spinning on this since December, but I am out of time/money/space now - 90% full hard drives. I have read answers going both ways on both questions.

 

[popatim]

Raiding drives at the end of a firewire connection makes little sense to me. FW800 tops out at under 80MB/s which any modern single full sized drive will exceed.

Running the drives independently also makes little sense as they will fight for bandwidth if you try to use them simultaneously. (ie - one source drive, one scratch drive, one destination drive)

This leaves 'space' as the final frontier. I mean option. LoL.
If you have time and inclination, put the drives into a raid 5 and test performance. This will at least get you redundancy also.

If you've already max'd the iMac's Ram the an SSD might be your best option for increased productivity. I don't think you can get a quadro in there. 🙁