Best use of a striped volume

[ethu]

Hi,

I will appreciate if I can be pointed in the direction of best usage of my disks.

The machine configuration is as follows.

Motherboard - ASUS P5K PREMIUM/WIFI-AP LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel
HDD - 500 GB x 1 Maxtor, 250 GB x 1 Seagate, 250 GB x 1 Western Digital
Memory - 8 GB (Two kits of Patriot Extreme Performance 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model PDC24G6400LLK)
OS - Windows 7 64 bit RC (Pre-ordered Windows 7 Home Premiu

I want to know if I

a) Can use the above mentioned motherboard's JMicron RAID controller to create a striped array of the two 250 GB HDD mentioned above ?
b) If yes, what will be the best use of the striped volume be ?
I am aware that a striped volume can be dangerous in terms of security, is it best used for installing OS and applications only (I always use C drive only for OS and programs and all my personal data including "My Documents" usually resides on D drive).
c) How much performance gains can I expect if I do use a striped volume as above ?
d) As I have 8 GB of memory, and Windows 7 allows each volume to have a page file, is it really advantageous to have a page file on each drive. I am of the understanding that page file should be on a separate drive from the OS and contiguous for best performance.

Thanking in advance,

Ethu

 

[Aoster87]

You cannot create any sort of Raid configuration with the two 250GB hard drives because they are not identical, except for JBOD configurations, aka Just a Bunch Of Discs.

That being said, JBOD does not have any performance or reliability gains but what it does is combine drives to be shown as a single volume. Most raid controllers don't offer this feature because it is seldom used.

Secondly, if you have 8GB of memory and are running the x64 version of Windows, you don't really need a page file, unless you are running an absolute ton of memory hogging programs at the same time. However, I would set a small page file on one of the storage drives, but certainly not the drive containing your OS.