RAID 0 worth it?

[mitch212k]

sup guys

thinking of building a pc sometime in the summer ... am considering possibly going with a 750i or more likely P35 mobo, putting 2 x 500GB Samsung Spinpoints in RAID 0.

The 2 HD's will be all the storage, other than a 250GB WD External HD I Have, and I will be using them for games, os , documents etc

This will be the first machine i've ever built from scratch myself, from what I see RAID isn't *that* difficult to set up? Is it worth the performance gain? How likely is drive failure? I've had this OEM pos for 4 yrs now and the 80G Seagate is going strong after hours of heavy use each day ...

Cheers!
mitch

 

[semi-pro waster]

Opinions vary, I had a Raid0 setup for a couple of years (two different PCs) and then went back to individual drives without noticing any significant speed difference except in benchmarks. Data loss isn't tremendously likely but you will have increased the risk because you are depending on two drives to keep working in sync rather than just one.

If you are a user that works with large contiguous files often then it is probably worth it but remember to backup any documents that are important to you reguarly - in fairness you should do this anyway.