Use the tool hdparm to set up better harddisk performance. Though I have seen laptop disk enabled with striping, I can't see a reason to do so, because in my humble opinion also known as RAID0 striping needs at least two different disks to increase performance. Before using hdparm check the BIOS settings for harddisk parameters like DMA or ATA4 or 32bit transfer. The bad thing is that if something is disabled there - it can not be enabled with hdparm!

See UNIX and LINUX Computing Journal: Tunable Filesystem Parameters in /proc How to increase, decrease and reconfigure filsystem behavior from within /proc.