So I've got two 500GB HDs...

[Kasdar]

Ok, I am a computer technician. I got my degree in 1993 and my A+ Cert in 1996. I fully concur with what Fyron said. RAID 0 is very bad and those of you who think your hard drives won't fail are the ones who are gonna have the most problems. If you don't care about redundancy simply partition your primary hard drive with a reasonable partition for storing WINDOWS, then use the remaining partition and the other drive for your data and programs. There is no reason to do a RAID 0 configuration as with the drives you are using and the array's that come with windows and/or motherboards you WILL NOT see any improvement in performance, however you mast likely will eventually run into a situation where you will lose everything because of a simple disk failure, if you decide on the RAID 0 approach.

The option I might suggest to you would be to install WINDOWS on your 160gb HD and, use the other 2 drives in a raid 1 array to store your data. that way you have the best of both worlds. As most motherboards have 2 IDE headers that each support 2 drives. Put the 160gb HD as a master on the same cable as your CD/DVD drive and set it to slave. Then run the 2 500gb HD's on the other Header and use RAID 1.