I thought I might comment on some observations since installing a 2 drive stripped RAID in my Mac Pro for running OSX and Parallels/XP. I was running a maxtor 500gb sata II HD, which had data thru put rates in the neighborhood of 50-60 read/write. Closer to 40-50 when the drive would start filling up with data. I built a stripped RAID using (2) Western Digital 250gb sata II drives, the hds that come standard in Mac Pro computers. The data rates have jumped to 140-150 read/write. A very nice speed boost, albeit on a relatively empty drives. While my primary OSX "work" applications like Final Cut Pro and After Effects don't seem to benefit from the RAID speeds, the Parallels/XP environment definitely does. Not only do the apps under XP open much faster, they are updating much faster for simple operations like chart indicator changes in QuoteTracker & Ninja Trader. I don't expect the speed of the charting of the iQfeed to change, but I am interested to see if I notice any other benefits from the faster RAID boot volume. On a side note, I do make it a common practice to clone/back up using superduper/ccc. Given the extra risk associated with running a RAID, I would be inclined to be even more diligent. I'll report any additional observations after a few days of running the new config.
Hm... those results are not really typical. Usually a RAID 0 with 2 drives is about a 70% increase... So more than double, what you're seeing is unusual. Probably had a bottleneck somewhere. Still 140 MB/s is very impressive for SATA drives!