Hardwaretech has posted an article on how to configure and benchmark the ultimate $300 RAID 0 array

The ultimate disk subsystem ought to have performance and capacity to burn. The boot disk should have disk access times on the order of 8ms and should boast 8MB of cache. The user space should offer a similar seek time for frequently used files and be capable of transfer rates around 90MB/s. An archive, on a separate disk, should be available for all data files in the user space. The system page file should be in a RAID 0 array off the boot disk. This article argues that with intelligent partitioning, a $100 80GB Western Digital boot disk, two $70 40GB IBM 120GXP Deskstars in RAID 0, and a $40 Highpoint RAID controller can offer all of these performance characteristics within a $300 budget.

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