I built my desktop PC in August of 2006, nearly two years ago. I purchased two Seagate 7200.10 320GB Barracuda's for my main drive. I had done some research and found that these would give me a good deal of speed (when in RAID) for a decant amount of money (way less than a WD Raptor).

Since the drives were SATA I didn't think twice about the jumpers on the back because they are traditionally used for ATA master/slave settings. I figured they were for factory settings that needn't be changed. It turns out I was wrong! Those jumpers have been cutting my drive performance in half. Seagate uses them to ensure that SATA/150 is the default drive configuration for backwards compatibility. My system has supported SATA/300 since its build date. So i popped the little buggers out and did some testing. Turns out that they made a big difference in performance. Test results below...