Looking for fastest storage setup

I am thinking of building a new computer and have been wondering what would be the fastest HDD or SSD setup. Raid or just plain drives I am looking for the fastest setup for gaming which I would assume would rely heavily on read operations. I know that there is a price curve for new tech. So I am wondering what would be the best with no price limits, and what would be best with minor price restrictions. I was looking for a post specifically on this but wasn't sure what to search for. So if anyone has an answer or a link to a thread already covered by this it would be appreciated.

Also if raid, I would like some data security if possible, preferably not raid 1, but something like raid 5, as I just had a raid 0 HDD failure.

Thanks

Without questioning your assumptions, here's a good read:

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/arti [...] VzaWFzdA==

This should fulfill your needs: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/03/09/video-samsung-ssd-ra.html

Check out some of these:

Fusion-io ioDrive & ioDrive Duo

OCZ Z-Drive

Super Talent RAIDDrive

+ lots of discrete SSDs
to choose from now

+ Gigabyte i-RAM & i-RAM Box

and ACARD ANS-9010

for some SDRAM-based products.


A really cheap and very cost-effective
solution is to bulk up on lotsa RAM
(that's a brand name -- "lotsa"
and install RamDisk Plus from
http://www.superspeed.com

We've installed several copies
of RamDisk Plus and have had "lotsa"
success moving our browser caches
to ramdisks ~ 3.0GB/second measured!

Version 9.0.4.0 also utilizes
unmanaged memory under
Windows XP 32-bit version -- NICE!

Our client just installed it on an
8GB AMD PC and his ramdisk is 2GB --
VERY NICE!!


MRFS

Have you considered an SSD? If that's too expensive a single Velociraptor is a good alternative. Pair this with some huge data disks (like two 1TB WD Green drives) and you have both speed, storage and data security if one of the TB drives acts as backup.

About the iRAM: its nice but it totally fails:

- still bottlenecked by 3Gbps SATA, byebye 2GB/s speeds!
- it uses DDR1 memory instead of DDR2
- battery hold up time was only 48 hours or so i remember

Instead, they should make a PCIe RAM drive, with 8x DDR2 that would be both cheap and extremely fast. Just not so much space, but hey with 16GB it would be really cool.

If no price limits = unlimited funds.
Theoretically speaking, with UNLIMITED funds , you could build a storage device out of CPU's cache. That way whatever data you put in there will have closest path to the CPU core. I imagine you would also need specialized motherboard to use that kind of storage device but with UNLIMITED funds that shouldn't be a problem.

For more realistic setup, you could:
1. Get 4 X25-E and do RAID5 setup.

2. Install lots of ram and use SuperSpeed to make a Ramdrive out of it. I bench-marked my ramdisk and the speed is 8GB/s read and 5GB/s write. It's not bootable and you will have to wait long time on shutdown/restart but all your apps/games on that ramdrive will have lightning fast read/write.