2x 7,200 RPM RAID 0 VS 1x 15,000 RPM?

[Geoff]

160GB SATAII 7,200RPM Hard Drive - $45
150GB SATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive - $169
147GB SCSI 15,000RPM Hard Drive - $249

For a desktop, it's not worth getting a SCSI drive, let alone a raptor if storage space is something you want a lot of, you could spend that extra $125 and buy a much better video card or processor.

For the last two weeks I've repaired at least 1 WD Caviar SE a DAY. Don't tell me they don't go that often. And, on top of that, RAID 0 INCREASES that chance by at least double, because a Caviar SE was never designed for that role.

Do not encourage people to make a very bad choice.

Data, not your CPU, is the most important thing on that computer. The more you rely on that data, the less important it is that you get a 13,000 in 3DMark (yet crappy VGA scores).. and more important that you preserve your data.

Yes hard drives do die, we've had several Mac laptops which needed to go in for repair because of faulty hard drives. There are also lots of solutions for backups or redundancy, you don't need to have RAID 0. Heck I don't know why the average desktop should even have RAID as it causes major headaches. For me, my motherboard doesn't have any RAID drivers that I can find, so I can't install XP or any other older OS on my array. One of the reasons I have RAID 0 is because I don't want to have 4 separate hard drives with free space on all of them, I wanted to merge them all into one hard drive where I can store all my programs and data on, however I perform backups almost daily onto a 500GB external drive.