2 Barracudas and what to do?

[Ed]

I've just bought another Barracuda 7200.10 320GB to go alongside the existing Barracuda 7200.10 250GB but after a bit of reading up it doesn't appear that I've got optimum performance from them.

First of all after fitting the new one I discovered a jumper which sets it to 1.5GB/s instead of the 3GB/s which I know my motherboard supports [MSI PowerUp Ed for Intel C2D]. Secondly, they are just set as C: and D: separate drives.

Is there anything to be had from pulling the drives out, setting them to 3GB/s and then configuring RAID0? What tangible results will I see from doing this, eg. boot times or playing FSX? I'm just trying to justify pulling the computer apart and reinstalling Windows which is a good mornings work.

Thanks for any wisdom.

 

[rpstewart]

Removing the jumper won't make any appreciable difference to real world performance, the drives aren't being constrained by SATA1 bandwidth.

You could RAID them and get a reasonable increase in sustained transfer rate but with the associated risk of data loss. In theory the Intel Matrix RAID should allow you to create a single 500Gb RAID0 array and still access the remaining 70Gb of the 320Gb drive as a single partition. This is a feature unique to the newer Intel controllers and I've not heard of anyone actually doing it so it's not guaranteed to work.

 

[Ed]

Thanks for that. All I needed not to hear not bother then.