No bubble to burst! I'm still a 3Ware guy!

It also may deal with how you became aware of RAID.

"High end" graphical workstations (we are talking of Autocad 9 or 10) bunch of SCSI disks with Adaptec controller.

Already posted, but JFYI, re :

I guess some of you guys are crazier than me lol!

http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm

jaclaz

The only method I am comfortable with is using RAID1 on a system volume

I don't understand why. So what if a drive fails on you once every 10 years. Reghost or reinstall, problem solved (pretty quickly too). I don't see any point to using RAID1 on a home desktop or workstation (nor do I even care for my work machines -- the day the drives die, I'll just take the opportunity to reinstall).

and RAID5 or RAID10 for data

Which is mostly pointless IMO (you have to have proper backups anyway -- mirroring and/or partity just makes the "restoring" process quicker), for my usage at least. RAID5 is CPU-hogging (unless you shell out major $ for a fancy controller), and every single RAID level you mentioned is wasteful (1 is ridiculous, 10 is still quite bad, and 5 is only "OK" with 4 drives or more) and requires a fair amount of drives for any decent capacity.

RAID0 gives me plenty of speed (crazy fast file transfers/copying, very fast AV editing e.g. when trying to sync audio, etc) and nice large volumes. It's great (although SSDs will soon replace that -- I might RAID those too). Other levels waste my space (hence money), waste CPU power, use more [electrical] power for the same capacity (and more heat/noise), etc.

I also would never use any software RAID controllers (like ICH, Promise, Adaptec)

They work perfectly fine for the vast majority of non-server needs (of course, I wouldn't stick such a card in a high-load server). For home use, they're great and dirt cheap too. But yes, with a $800 ARC-1230 controller I'd have some more speed and perhaps 1% more CPU power available to me (then again, pray your card never dies on you, that would make recovery fun!)

Areca > 3ware

Hmmm I had not heard of that manufacturer before. When talking about a workstation or a home PC, I agree with the drive failing thing. I only have experience using RAID in Servers. Well no I know there was some in VAIO but I didn't think it was a good idea for Sony to do that.

I've been running RAID0 for about 3 or 4 years for Windows and apps/games.

I use two old but capable WD 120GB drives and the performance gain over a single drive is noticeable.

I have yet to see them fail *knocks on wood* and they are like 6 years old.

My main desktop has Windows x64 with ICH9 and sleep/resume and spin down settings work as expected.

Every time I reinstall Windows, I load the drivers from an USB flash drive, even knowing that Windows 7 has the last version included, though.

Try reinstalling your RAID/AHCI drivers and see if there is a BIOS update for our motherboard.