How to manage Raid for best performance?

Question

I have read the posts about the use of raid but I have three problems,
1 How do I check what raid level I am on and if I change levels from 1 to 0 will it destroy my existing data?
If I want to, how do I change it ? - I cant see anthing on control panel or system.
Currently I have three disks but can only see 2 in Windows explorer so I would guess I am already using Raid 0 on the first 2 ?
2. Likewise how can I change the pagefile location? (WinXP, Intel core duo)
3. From the table on raid choices, it suggests that 3 seperate disks are better then 2 yet people says that 2 disks using raid 0 as one disk is twice as fast as either of the disks used seperately.
The suggestion that media goes on the last disk seems to conflict with this because the worst thing that slows editing down is shuttling along the timeline trying to find the right piece of clip. This is presumably driving the poor little HD heads all over the place on the media disk. So wouln't it be better to have the media disk the fastest? If you had raid 0 then media should be on that first raid combined disk ?
Super RPM speed I would think is not as important as HD track access time.
Any comments?

Answer 1

Yes I saw that article before and it was that which left me perplexed
Anyway I disconnected my raid (it was Raid1) so now I have three drives.
C: 130g HD OS, pagefile & PE9 Program & Media Cache
E: 500g HD Media
G: 130g HD Project & all other PE files except the media cache.
It now flies along during editing, zipping up and down a AVCHD 1920x1080i 1hr 25 min project as quick as you can move the mouse. It takes about 1 second to preview/play a clip after I have selected it from a different part of the movie.
The first and last frames of each clip stay there when I zip up and down the timeline wheras previously I had to wait ages until they reloaded if I went to the end of the long timeline.
This is much much faster than when I had it all on one raid1 drive.
I can't complain about AVCHD speed so if anyone else does, 3 drives is the answer.
It took 20 secs to load PE9 and 45 secs to load the project after PE9 was running, (up to 3 minutes before).
I have Win XP, 2.4 core duo,.800mhz board with 2mb ram and 3 cheap Sata hard disks,
Having the PE9 program on the same disk as the pagefile should also be OK because I would think the bulk of the app code in use at any time would be in memory and only the prog dll files accessed when you want to change a setting or rarely used effect. That is the way I'd design PE9 if I did it.
I though the pagefile is only there because you haven't enough memory to do everything in memeory.
What is the purpose of the media cache. I can never see anthing in it while I am editing. Is it do to with writing the DVD which I havent got arounf to doing yet?
Ted