RAID 0 Stripe Size

[parks]

Hi, I am planning on setting up a RAID 0 for a new install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and to house some games and productivity software.

I have bought two Caviar Black 500GB drives and will also use a 1TB Seagate 7200.12 storage drive to house my downloaded movies/music and essentially the my documents folder in Windows 7 so that if/when my RAID goes down I don't lose my stuff.

I am wondering if this is a good strategy and if so how big I should make the stripe size. What kind of files should I store on the RAID vs the storage drive? I'm looking for improved boot times and to improve my 5.9 base score for my HD in the Windows Experience Index.

I don't have the budget to purchase an SSD right now, atleast not the one I want. If I can't get a good one, I don't want one at all!!

My current system specs are:
i7 920 @ 3.31
Asus P6T Deluxe
6GB Patriot Viper Series Low Latency
BFG GTX260 OC
Corsair 620W Modular
2x Caviar Black 500GB (hopefully in RAID 0)
Seagate 7200.12 1TB (Storage Drive)
Antec 902
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Signature Edition

Your help is appreciated!
Parks

 

[sub mesa]

128KiB.

 

[hetman6]

bad news. your score will not improve from 5.9 without going to SSD.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/19/engineering-the-windows-7-windows-experience-index.aspx

 

[Sethdood]

Hetman6, I don't really think that's accurate:

"As a note, the tests don’t specifically check to see if the underlying storage device is an SSD or not. "

If your non-SSDs fly, on a raid or not, I'm sure it'll put you in high end range. It would be silly if it didn't, considering the relative importance of HDD speed in gaming. I mean to say, as long as your HDD is in a certain range it won't bottleneck your other high end expensive hardware, and that range isn't only limited to SSDs. Yet. It will be later on I'm sure.

 

[sub mesa]

Ay but why should you care about such a useless single mark. Storage I/O performance cannot be expressed by a single number; it depends on the task. At the very least it should be separated in sequential and non-sequential performance. For storing large amounts of data consisting of mainly large files, you don't need alot of non-sequential performance and thus HDDs are fine and may even beat SSDs when writing, especially if you're using striping RAID.