Sam, might want to try testing with ICH10R. A family member is a microprocessor engineer for Intel's chipsets (I'm not sure which they are working on now or have in the past), but there have been both performance and featureset improvements with each generation of southbridge. I'm sure there's a significant difference between ICH7R and ICH10R for RAID0 performance.. I wish I could find the link, but there was a review when the ICH9R came out and the improvement numbers were impressive.