Here’s a good tip: My 160 GB Seagate hard disk started to fail so I decided to try RAID 0 on my old Intel DG965WH motherboard. I purchased two 320 GB Western Digital Caviar Blue (WD3200AAJS) drives. I mounted the drives on the system and installed Intel Matrix Storage drivers in Windows 7. I ran a benchmark on HDTach and was satisfied. I checked for a newer version of this driver but found nothing. After 2 months I learned that the new version of this driver is called Intel Rapid Storage. I was not expecting any performance boost at all but when I ran the benchmark again it showed a 28% increase on sustained rates! Check out the videos below (best viewed in 480p):
This is the HDTach result while using Intel Matrix Storage Technology
This is the HDTach result while using Intel Rapid Storage Technology, see the huge difference on both sustained and burst rates of the drive