These days, we expect technology hold true to its promise of ever increasing speeds, and so we find ourselves waiting impatiently at the PC as the system boots, launches an application, or copies a large amount of data. If time really is that critical for you, then consider optimizing the hard disk or storage performance.

There are several approaches of how to speed up storage performance and increase data safety. The most effective way is to use hard drives that merely consist of RAM chips (so-called Solid-State Disks). As you can imagine, such drives are very expensive and thus do not come into question for most users.

RAID systems are a more popular and affordable option, but only if they are set up with IDE drives! SCSI is still more expensive, but more on that later. Basically, RAID is a system to increase both performance and data safety by using multiple drives (RAID: Redundant Array of Independent Drives). However, many users do not consider Mode 0 (striping) to be a viable RAID mode because it does not add redundancy, meaning that it can put your data under a high risk: If one drive fails, all data on the whole drive array will be lost.

RAID 0 arrays are not meant to be a long-term storage solution due to the safety issue. But they are suitable very well for fast short-term storage (swap file, temporary drive, video editing, video encoding).