Thanks for the detailed response Paul. While we're at it, let me drop another riddle out there.

Assuming you are on a 4 core server, what would you chose as a high performance disk configuration for your data files?

A) All your data files on an 8-disk RAID 10 array.

B) Splitting your data files into filegroups, and placing them on 4 RAID 1 arrays.

Based on the reading I have been doing, I'm inclined to think that option B would be the most performant, as it takes better advantage of parallellism because each CPU is performing IO on each file simultaneously.

I am wondering though, how those benefits would stack up against RAID 10.