It's only worth it if you are doig raid 0+1 at the same time, and have other redundancies at the same time IMO
I said it will add a few seconds onto your boot time. I.E. booting up your machine will take longer due to the RAID BIOS having to load. Benchmarks mean very little, especially if you don't understand what they're showing you. So ignore them. There is a huge increase in data throughput when you get RAID 0, but that's not what you want. You want seek times. Think of it like this, for those who want to shift lots of cargo around, a huge truck is great. But trucks need lots of maintanence because they're big hulking things. For those who want to go to lots of different places and only pick up a tiny ammount of cargo, what's preferable, a truck (RAID 0) or a porsche (a Raptor)? That's right, to quickly get lots of little things that are all over the place, you want a fast vehicle, not one that can carry huge loads. Even a standard family saloon (any 7200RPM drive you pick) is preferable to the truck (RAID 0), at least it's cheaper and safer if no faster. Now when games load, they load dozens or sometimes hundreds of small files and bits of data. They need a nippy drive with low seek times that can zoom about the place finding that data in the shortest time possible. Whether it can shift 80MB/s or 250MB/s is kind of irrelevent when the file itself may only be a few kilobytes, what's taking the time isn't the loading of the file but simply finding it. This is why RAID 0 is useless for decreasing game loading times or improving general windows performance. It's no faster than a regular disk at finding stuff (sometimes actually slower) and the benefit one gains from the increased read speeds is so minimal that even when measuring it, it's often statistically insignificant. Hope that helps.
Wow I was going to get a RAID 0 setup but with this explanation I will get a Raptor instead, thanks for this clear and sharp explanation
RAID0 is most definitely NOT worth it for home use. The speed increase isn't noticible at all (and in some areas, it's actually slower), and you'll always have to put up with stupid driver issues and data backup will be more critical than ever. I tried it for quite some time and it was absolutely never worth the effort. Anything short of RAID5 (preferably plus a hot spare) is stupid for home use, except for RAID1 (mirroring) if you're too lazy to have a proper backup solution. And no matter what, you should really not bother unless you have a RAID setup in a dedicated NAS box (or something like the Drobo, which you don't need to worry about RAID since it handles it all internally). It's generally irritating to set up, and you don't want to have to deal with it on a daily basis - you want to just be able to mount a network share and let the small server do all of the thinking in that department. That way if there are RAID problems it doesn't directly affect your main machine, and vice-versa. As an aside, you'll get about the same (if not better) performance by simply keeping your disks well-defragged. It minimizes seek times, which RAID doesn't help with at all. Heck, a properly defragmented standard 7200rpm drive will outperform a Raptor in random seek time in my experience, or at least give it a run for it's money.
