RAID 0 - Hard drive Performance Slow?

When I set up my EVGA 780i mb, my primary XP Pro (32 bit) drive is a 80gb raid 0 using 2 x 40gb Seagate barracuda's drives based on the assumption that raid 0 striping would be really quick.

I think i screwed up though because these drives have very small caches of only 2mb (verses my 320gb w/ 16mb). I realize the hd cache size is probably linked to total hd capacity.

At first i thought my P4 cpu was the issue and got a pretty good deal on a q9300. But using Systemometer it's clear the cpu isn't the problem because there are times when my primary drive is maxed out at 100 percent for a few seconds and my apps are sitting around waiting. It affect one of my apps with a slight stutter when i select items in the app.

I've been playing with XP Pro’s systems properties vm and system cache, and even excluded my primary drive and increased the system cache on my larger secondary drive (non-raid) which didn’t seem to make a difference.

I'm think'n I need to exchange these drives with larger caches.

RAID 0 does not offer a general performance increase at all. It offers only a major increase in huge writes.

Random I/O which is what 90% of all home user hard drives do for the majority of their life does not benifit at all from a RAID 0.