Building a new spec OS Disk(s) Conundrum

[Marakith]

Hello!

I've been lurking in the forums for a bit trying to make my mind up about my new build.

I'm currently re-thinking my decision to go with a Raptor as my OS disk.

I'm designing a system mainly for gaming (and I like to multitask). I really, really want to avoid a system that churns its disk. Instead I want to build a system that's smoother than a baby's bottom.

Originally, I was going to go for a big (150Gb) Raptor as the OS disk (ie. to hold Windows, Office and the swapfile) as well as a storage disk (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, as recommended by Semi-Pro Waster) to hold games and the like.

I've noticed that two Seagate Barracuda 7200.10s cost LESS than a big Raptor, and each have more storage to boot. Plus the buffer is bigger and they're almost as fast. They're also SATA-II.

So I was thinking of buying three, putting two of them in a RAID1 array and using the third as a storage disk.

So my questions are:

1] Is that a good idea for performance etc.?
2] What's the optimal way to configure the storage of swap files, game files, office etc?
3] Is there anything I should be wary of?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Marakith]

What I would persoanlly do is get 2 x 36Gb 16mb cache raptors and put them in RAID0 for the OS drive, and use a 7200.10 for storage. If you put 2 x 7200.10s in RAID1, the read speed will be a bit faster than a single drive, but write performance may be slower. RAID1 is intended more for redundancy than performance. You could put 2 x 7200.10's in RAID0, but that would mean a somewhat exessively large OS/Programs drive.

That seems pretty reasonable:

1] You don't think SATA-II makes a big difference, then?
2] Does anyone know if Vista will need a bigger OS Disk than 36Gb?

Thanks!