Hard Drives

[samsc]

OK, so lets say on my options, a

But regarding Macs, Internal RAID SATA2 on a mac, on my resarch are fast as WD Raptors... may be not in Latency and all OK.

Only with meaningless - single file - sequential access files.

The headline data transfer rate is meaningless - Catalyst needs to be rated with random access files.

The only program you can benchmark with catalyst is catalyst...

You want to test the above for yourself - get some sata drives and get a raptor - and see what happens.
You need to be aware as well that sata drives do not have equal performance either. there are large and meaningful differences between brands.

[samsc]

XServe raid has an enormous buffer - 512MB/channel - so it can read lots of data at once.
thats why it works well.