Hard drive help with older mobo...

Hey Folks,

I searched first for answers, but just couldn't find apples to apples answers.

I have an Asus P4C 800 Deluxe MoBo w/P4 3.00 GHz cpu, xp home - upgrading to xp pro, running a RT.x100 Extreme Pro w/Premier Pro 7.0.

The mobo has 2 SATA connectors and a separate Promise SATA raid on board(2 drive capacity).

My goal would be to use a Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 SATA 150 200gig drive (which I already own) as the boot drive.

Now for the raid setup...

Sata vs. sata 2, rpm, and cache size vs availability.

Question 1: will a sata-300 work on a mobo sata-150? I read that the sata-300 has a jumper which, left in place, will allow the drive to work in the place of the 150. Is this true and without consequence? Ques 1a: cable the same?

Question 2: What could bite me with the purchase of the 2 drives for the SATA RAID? Do I lose or gain anything going with the more available SATA-300 7200rpm 16mb drives with the jumper in place? or do I need to stay with a SATA-150 drive? Q2a: About rpm and cache... I can get a WD Raptor 10,000rpm 16mb 150GB. But then I'm limited to 300gb total as a video raid. (and they are comparatively expensive at $170ea) or I see SATA-300 320 or400GB 7200rpm 16mb with many more brand/model choices. This gives me more total GB space. And as I research it, SATA drives lose their speed beyond 1/2 full, which seems to make total capacity very important.

On the cache issue, there are some 8mb for both 150 and 300. lots of 16mb and a couple of 32mb choices. Real time pros/cons?

Please help me to not stick my hand in the blender when making this purchase decision!

Edit: And a question about dual channel ram... I have 1 gig currently (2 512 sticks). I know ram should be matched. But does that mean per channel or total? Should I replace my current with two matched 1 gig sticks or keep my existing and buy another 2 matched 512 sticks? Thanks.

Thanks in advance,

Steve

A1: The cable is the same for SATA I and II. And yes, SATA II disks have a jumper to limit data tranfar to 150 Gbs (or at least seagate disks, which are those i work with)

A2: you wont see much difference unless u work HDV or uncompressed SD files... and honestly that's out of P4 league. But two SATA 300 7200 rpm work fine for HDV.

A3: about the ram, u can have two 512 and two 1GB dimms. SO if u have 4 slots this is the best option