Hard drive setup/partitioning

[infowarrior45]

Hi guys,

I'm just setting up my PC. Since they were on sale, I picked up 3 WD Caviar Black 750GB HDDs. All I was thinking about at the time was space, space, space, since I was always running out of space on my 160GB. I did less research/thinking on hard drives than any of my other components. Now that I look back, I probably should have gotten a small SSD for OS/programs in place of two of of the 750GBs.

Anyways, how do you think I should set these three drives up for good performance? I will be storing a lot of videos/large audio files. I was thinking of setting up two drives for everday use, and keeping the third drive for backing up.

I read that somtimes partitioning the drives, and putting the OS and programs on one partition is good? Would there be any point for me to do RAID with the onbard controller? I read this article on short stroking...any point of doing that?

Tom's Hardware article on Short Stroking
Accelerate Your Hard Drive By Short Stroking : On The Stroke Of Performance: Hard Drive Short Stroking - Review Tom's Hardware

Thanks!
infowarrior45

Core i7 920
Sunbeam Core-Contact Freezer
EVGA x58 SLI
EVGA GTX 285 SC
OCZ Platinum RAM DDR3 1600 3x2GB
Corsair 750 watt PSU
CoolerMaster HAF 932
x3 WD OEM Caviar Black 750GB
Samsung SH-S223Q OEM
Vista Ultimate 64-bit OS

[chuck4456]

Raid 5.

[glc]

Negative on the RAID 5 - that's over the 2 TB limit and won't be bootable. Also, for good performance and stability, a RAID 5 needs to be at least 4 drives.