need hard drive help switching to sata

[m-man]

Hey, i have 2 ide hard drives in a raid 0, but they are still the bottleneck of my system

i want to move to 2 sata HDs in a raid 0,

my motherboard is an abit ni8-sli which has 6 sata ports,

4 at the bottom and 2 at the top, ..apparently on different controllers? i dont know about that

so whrere should i plug them in to get the best performance?
does it matter if i add a 3rd drive for storage so that it would be 2 in a raid 0 and the other one just regular?

also do the HDs need to match in brand, or can i use any 2 drives that are the same size, speed, and cache?
thanks

http://www.trustedreviews.com/images/article/inline/1813-1a.jpg

[shakey]

You won't really get much of an increase in throughput in moving to sata, unless you have the cash and go for aither some 10k drives or ssd disks.

Ideally you really do want 2 drives of the same manufacturer+model to reduce chances of something going wrong or not quite working right (especially important for RAID 0 due to the lack of backup or checksums)

Adding extra non-raid drives souldn't be an issue.