I have 4 Western Digital SATA 250mb hard drives with 16 mb cache,
I also have 2 Maxtor 250 PATA with 16 mb cache,

2 D945PSN mother board with an 840 dual core CPU, 2 gigs of ram,

I need to build 2 PC's.

One for an artist and one for a programmer.

For the artist:

I'm thinking I should run 2 of the SATA drives in raid 0 and use the 2
PATA (EIDE) configured in raid 1 (mirrored) as storage.

On the SATA raid 0 will be windows XP, Photoshop and the Photoshop
scratch (temp) files.

Should I put the scratch file on the mirrored PATA drives?

My main goal of course is to get rid of that stupid flashlite... yes,
I've turned off the index service. Waiting for the files to list is
driving me crazy.

For the programmer:

Raid 1 with the remaining 2 SATA drives. Why? Because the programming
PC will take days to set up and if the boot drive fails I don't want to
have to reinstall all the apps. Reinstalling Photoshop is not that big
of a deal.

Any improvements to my plan?

If I used harddrives with an 8mb cache in raid 0, would I see a
differance? Should I use the 16mb PATA in raid 0 and mirror cheaper
8mb cache drives?

I guess the question is: do I gain anything by striping drives with a
16mb cache instead of an 8mb cache.

I also have a couple of AMD pc's to build next month, should I use the
same strategy?

TIA