I've set up FreeBSD 7.X using gstripe (RAID 0) with two 320 GB SATA disks and raw read speed went from 70 MB/s to 110 MB/s. I'd like to know if I can reasonably expect similar gains (say roughly 200 MB/s) if I add two more identical disks to the stripe set (I understand I may lose my current data in the process of reinitializing the stripe, that's not a problem right now.) A related question would be how many disks can I put in a stripe set before the speed gain flattens out?
I've got an Intel Q9550 Quad CPU and 8 GB RAM so I don't think that's going to be a bottleneck. Using ASUS motherboard SATA ports. I'm currently reading about 500 GB multiple times more or less "sequentially" as part of a data-mining experiment. I'd like to save the $$$ and avoid the headache if this is going to be a dead end. TIA