3 hard drives in raid 0 ?

You can add a 3rd drive, but you won't see much difference. I'd set the 3rd drive up as a backup instead.

Well, I'll split the difference between the last two posters.
I think you'll see some gain, but I doubt it will be a 33% gain - how much will depend on your controller, your system and your usage patterns to name a few.

On the down side, with each added disk you increase your odds of having a failure - and thus knocking out your Raid0 array. As with anything, make sure you make backups periodically so you don't lose any important data if you do have a failure.

I have a gigabyte ep45-ds3r, its using the intel raid ich10r controller. How do i enable cahce ??? where do i do that ?.

I'd agree that HD's tend to be pretty reliable these days - but having said that, the fact remains that you are increasing your odds of a failure by running in a RAID0 config (doesn't stop me from doing it myself - but people should be aware of it and take the appropriate precautions).

As for the benefits of doing R0 - that certainly does depend on the controller and system setup. I'm trying to find a link to an Anand article that showed R0 on mobo controllers perf not worth it - barley better doing R0 with two new Raptors then with a single Raptor for almost all applications. Their conclusion was for that type of setup, its not worth the extra risk.

If you use discrete controllers, things change. Here's an article that shows some of the ranges in performance depending on the controller: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/r [...] page=0%2C0

Hey great article on the raid controller cards, seems like there alot better than the onboard intel ich10r controller.

I know i have to wipe out and reformat my drives when i add the 3rd drive, thats ok because i dont have alot of stuff on them now, been playing with memory, hard drives etc, my other 2 samsung f1s come tomorrow so i will try 4 drives check the performance and try 3 drives and check performance, and go from there, but i think a raid controller card is in my near future for sure, thanks for all your great information and advice guys.