Since no one replied to my previous question I decided to give it a try. For those of you who are considering the same thing, this is my experience:
I purchased a Adaptec 1200A RAID 0 PCI card together with a second identical Seagate Barracude harddisk.
I installed the RAID board, made it the primary master, and this is where things went wrong. The VAIO recovery will install the win XP oem version on the RAID array correctly. However the first time you reboor it will give an error message that the system config is corrupt. You are advised to remove any extra disks you have installed and reinstall XP, rather impossible when the extra disk is the only disk. Any other options which are available will result in a reboot.
I contacted Sony support and they were very polite but unable to solve my problem. They claim that installing a RAID array is not an standard upgrade. The recovery disk will not install correctly since it is an OEM version of XP.
The only way to get things working is by using a XP retail version. This will do the trick and install correctly on any RAID 0 array. The downside is that all the extra software which comes with the RS222 will not install on a different version of XP than the one on the rescue disk.
So was it worth the effort? Unfortunately I cannot compare the increase in system startup performance sinde I am running a different operating system. But general disk performance improved enough to make me smile. If anyone is interested in the numbers let me know, I will run a benchmark.
