Raid Question: 40gb-Maxtor and 250 gb-7200.10

I was planning to put these two drives in Raid 0 with the p5w Dh mobo that I'm getting but I had two questions. Is this possible first of all or would the difference from the size just disappear into a Raid void? I'm guessing I'd do a 40 gb partition on both, and then Raid that. The leftover 210 will be for any storage. Would this be any faster than having a 7200.10 for main/ programs and the 40 for movies and songs?

I know the 7200.10 will have to slow down - a lot to match the 40 gb which only has 2mb cache btw. But it's raid 0.... Maybe that offsets it? I'm not worried about losing any data.

Edit.: Forgot to ask if spanning will increase performance or is striping the only way to gO?

VERY bad idea. First, if you put them in RAID0, you'll loose the 210MB left over, it's unusable. Second, you'll have worse performance in RAID0 with those two mismatched drives than you would with the Seagate by itself. The only "improvement" you'll see would be in max transfer rates, which doesn't mean much unless you move and manipulate huge files all day. Forget you ever thought of the idea. Take the 40GB drive and use it just for a page file and/or a backup file drive, that's about all it's worth. Spanning gives no performance advantage.

k thanks. Looks like I'll have to buy another three 7200.10 drives.