Best HDD config for a Win7 (x64) machine (RAID Volumes?)

[Xenor]

I was looking for information regarding the best way to configure a machine that has uTorrent running 24/7.

I'm about to upgrade some of the HDD in the machine, and was pondering what might be the best layout for a typical uTorrent box. Thanks to my ISP, I'm a burst leecher with 24/7 seeding to recover my ratio. I was hoping to learn the best way to configure my HDD in a way that would decrease long term cost (i.e. wear and tear on a single drive). I'm still trying to figure out if I need to tweek any of the advanced settings (i.e. Disk Cache, etc..) But I figured I'd ask if a hardware change might sense as well.

Typically, it is seeding at 30-40 kB/s, but a few times a week it will burst download up to the maximum speed of my connection (1000 kB/s). While searching the forum for information, I came across things like tweaking the Disk Cache, but the information was dated. In addition, most of the problems I've seen were for folks who were having problems of one kind or another. Currently, I do not have any issues, and have rarely seen the disk overload notification.

The machine is an Intel E8400 on P35/ICH9R w/ 4GB DDR800 RAM.

I currently have a single drive running as the temp/swap volume for uTorrent. I have two RAID0 volumes which store data and serve as host to seed files. Typically, I manually move files from the temp to the data volumes. Since the box is also a HTPC and home file server, the data volumes get typical read/write activity of larger files (350MB to 1.4GB). I do not index the temp drive. Once a month I perform maintenance w/ deep defrags, re-index & backup to external devices, during which time I shut down uTorrent.

While I cannot afford to give the temp volume its own RAID0, I have been considering a RAID5 setup or RAID10 setup with larger drives. Would it be better performance to let uTorrent continue living on a dedicated disk, or should I consider moving it to a RAID setup? Would the RAID setup potentially extend the life of the hardware by not hammering away at the single drive, or should I just track down an enterprise drive for the single drive volume?

And since I'm here asking, would advanced settings improve my performance and reduce disk I/O since I have excess RAM, or is that already handled by "automatic" settings.

I'm running 1.8.5 if that makes a difference, but would be willing to try the other versions if that might help.

Thanks for the help, and I apologize if my search terms were incorrect and I missed an obvious thread/FAQ that discusses this topic.

[Firon]

Best way to avoid wear and tear is to never let your disks spin-down. Honestly, there isn't anything worth doing, and reducing load on a disk drive does little to increase its lifespan.

Your speeds aren't high enough to warrant a larger cache (the cache serves solely to improve performance), and Windows will gladly use all your available remaining RAM for additional caching anyway.