How to set up my hard drive(s)

This is the system that im running.
- CPU AMD|2800/333 ATHLON XP BARTON R
- (1) DDR 512MB|DDR400 CL3 PC3200 RTL KINGSTON
- MB NFORCE2 A7N8X-UAY 400Mhz ASUS RT Motherboard
- ATI RADEON 9800 Pro 128MB 256-BIT AGP 8x/4x Vid Card
- Maxtor 52049h4 20gigs 7200 rpm 2mb buffer size (ITS OLD)

im not sure what to do, I was thinking of doing this and im not sure if it will work and if it will be faster. is it better to just get the:

Western Digital Raptor 36.7 G 10,000 RPM drive and just using that

OR

Putting the Western Digital Raptor 36.7 G 10,000 RPM in a hardware raid with my old Maxtor... ??? im just not sure if they have to have the same RPM and SIZE for the raid to be effective?????

thanks for the help.....

What are you trying to acheive? Are you just a home user or is the computer going to be running as a server. I'd personally, if being used as a home computer put the western dig, hd on one bus, the maxtor on another and have my o/s and programs on the western dig hd for faster access, whilst using the old hd as storage.

Basically im looking for speed and no freeze ups. I guess I can use the Maxtor as storage for MPE's, Movies, and other ****. But like I said, im looking for speed. Another question...???? I have a dual channel motherboard but its only using single channel, do I need another stick of ram to enable dual channel???

thanks....

So the setup i suggested before would be best with the hard disks you intend to use. I have a maxtor 120gb sata drive with my o/s and programs and another ata drive with mp3s and movies etc.
For the dual channel ram, you need two identical sticks of ram placed in (usually) banks 1 and 3. See your m/b manual for exact details. On boot your computer will note it as running at dual channel.

Rizla has the best idea for speed w/ your setup. Setting up a RAID with 1 IDE and 1 SATA drive would be very hard if you could do it at all, and it would only use 36.7gb of the 120gb drive. Also, it would be slower than a raid with say 2 Raptors.
Dual channel operation is nice, but don't expect huge increases in performance, more like a couple percent in most applications.