In regards to your post on the Seritek 2eEN4 - 4 drive enclosure RAID set-up + Hitachi E7K500 500GB's (Seritek 2eEN4 Enclosure/Seritek 2SE2-2 Controller in w/PCI-Express G5) and this mornings (news page) AMUG review of the Maxline 500GB 7H500F0, your readers may be interested in my set-up and benchmark results.

Test System/Hardware:

• G5 Dual 2.7GHz, 8GB RAM. OS X 10.4.8
• SeriTek/2eEN4 Four-Bay Hot-Swap External eSATA Enclosure
  
• SeriTek/1VE4 Four-Port External PCI-X Host Adapter
  
• Four Maxtor Maxline Pro 500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s hard drive model 7H500F0
  

(OWC has a SeriTek 2eEN4 Enclosure + 1VE4 PCI-X card bundle for $579.)

Drive Setup: 1TB - 4 drive Raid 0 array using the first 250GB of each drive (for best performance) - 64k stripe size (Old rule of thumb is larger stripe size is better for capture, smaller is better for random-access/database use.)

QuickBench 2.1 Test Series Results: (RAID array empty)

I've just had lots of success buying my clients Firmtek (and for that matter Wiebetech stuff). My clients are mostly all windows...(Alberta oil patch), and I was using the 2 bay Firmtek SATA enclosure for a while myself, until I saw the OWC specials linking me to the 4 bay at $100 off. (They also had an 'open box' 2eEN4 enclosure for $399, $100 off list.) Then the 4x500GB Maxlines price was too good to pass-up.
So a speedy TB RAID, for a fraction of what I used to pay for in the old days of SCSI.
Take care....and have a Great New Year.
-Rusty

(He later sent Bash results testing the outer tracks/1st partition (used for above RAID volume) vs entire disk/platter.)

• RAID Tests: Seritek 2eEN4 Enclosure (Hitachi E7K500 500GB x4)/Seritek 2SE2-2 PCI-Express Controller (G5 Dual 2.3GHz PCI-Express system)
• Mac Pro 4-Drive Internal SATA RAID 0 Tests (4x 320GB Seagate 7200.10's)
• AMUG review of Seritek 2eEN4 Enclosure
• AMUG review of Seritek 1VE4 PCI-X controller