when i still had my machine, i used to have the boot partitions and system apps on a 5Gb IDE drive with 256k cache (ok not alot of cache by todays multi megabyte standard but its was fast when i bought it), but the trouble was, the digital broadcaster NEEDED scsi for video recording / playback. so fine fine saved up and got a PPC card with ultrawide drives. and thought my machine takes SO long to boot. PPC drivers, GFX card drivers, librarys etc etc. and i had so much space that wasn't being used. so shuffled the boot partition and apps onto one of my video drives.
ok so FFS isn't the most effective filesystem around, but my boot times were halved, and heretic2 took about half the time to load levels... would NEVER go back to IDE on the amiga.. but thats all my CD/SX32 has.... on the PC i appriciate its a different matter, what with UDMA33/66/100/133/150. and as for that IDE raid stuff someone was talking about. thats great! and what amiga is that on? its not. so not relevant.
plus compairing a raid system to a single disk is a touch unfair. i was well happy with 25Mb a second (untweeked - not playing around with phase5's scsi tools) on my amiga. 36Mb tweeked. :-D