Cheap RAID 0 from old drives

[MatMK]

Hi,

I am trying to utilize my old sata II HDDs by bundling them together in a hardware RAID 0 on motherboard to get better speed and then use it as a system drive on older machine. I have 3x 80GB 7200RPM HDDs with 8MB of cache, two of them are the same model (around 60MB/s) and the third one alone is a bit faster (about 70MB/s), but same cache, size and manufacture. Problem is, that after testing the installed 3-disk RAID array in HD Tune, I seem to get strange speed curve (see attachment), so I tried to make the RAID array from only the 2 identical (slower) drives, and the curve looks more stabilized.

My question is, do you think I would better do with the 2-disk or 3-disk array and why? I also don't care about the extra 80GB of space from the 3-disk variant, the PC that would be using this setup is just for browsing the web, not my main PC. I am also aware of the risk that if one drive would fail, all data would be lost, but as I said there should be only system on this drive nothing else so it wouldn't be that much of a problem.

Thank you

[agent_x007]

Do not use HD Tune 2.55 (it's over 10Y old at this point !).
CrystalDiskMark, HD Tune Pro, ATTO, HD Tach, AS SSD, Anvil's Storage Bench.

[MatMK]

CrystalDiskMark gave me this results, although it cannot show the curve of speed through the HDD drive (in the beggining the HDD is always faster than on the inner part), only the first few GB, so I thought it is more focused on SSDs.

[EsaT]

HDDscan shows transfer speed curve, along with measuring time used for reading particular block.

(lots of slow blocks hints to problems/weak health of drive)

 

http://hddscan.com/

[MatMK]

14 minutes ago, EsaT said:

HDDscan shows transfer speed curve, along with measuring time used for reading particular block.

(lots of slow blocks hints to problems/weak health of drive)

 

http://hddscan.com/

Thank you, I will certainly try it, but it would take a lot of time if I should reconfigure the whole RAID all over again to test each variant, plus installing OS. Do you think that you can recommend me the optimal way based on my old results from HD Tune and CrystalDiskMark? Thank you