Xzin: well if you have the RaptorX drives they have a see through window on the top, so you can se what she's got under those clothes. Oh yeah and for the Mac's RAID cards are hard to come by, there are one or two aftermarket ones for my machine, but they require special drivers/hacks/and you can't boot off of them. although, i will try running a system activity monitor while i have the 5 clients open and see how many cores are being untilized. checking in the wow config.WTF file and how the "SET processAffinityMask" setting works, i've found that wow maxes out at utilizing 4 cores. i need to see if OSX will distribute the multiple wows to use the 8 cores, or will i just have 4 core not doing anything. if there are unused cores, maybe a software raid (thats built into the operating system) would be benificial.

warcrime: the SATA-300 interface is fast enough that all 5 drives shouldnt choke it. a raptor maxes out in a sequential read at 87mbyte/sec, 4 drives technically would max it out if they were able to sustain the max speed at the same time, but in real world applications and the small random seek/reads that wow is doing 5 drives wouldnt come close to maxing it out. the thing that is killing me is instance loading/continent loading/busy cities, all the damn random reads all over the place, and the 5 different wows fighting over the hard drive. sounds like a chorus or machine guns going off in the computer case, LOL. the more and more i'm experimenting with different ways of installing WoW on the machine, the more and more KeyClone's suggestion of multiple drives so each WoW can have a separate drive is looking better and better. the read/write heads just cannot keep up with how much the WoW's are asking them to move.

suprising what 200bux can get you, hard drive wise. i remember spending 500 on a 20mb 5.25" scsi drive WAAAAY-back-when.