I don't completely agree against raid0...
I did several tries.
1 vs. 2 raid0 "standard" 7200 hdd (seagate 7200.
on a cheap marvell raid controller
1 vs. 2 raid0 raptors on a ich9r
1 vs. 2 raid0 15k u320 scsi drives on a hp6400 hardware raid controller
Obviously, none of these are silent, neither something near "quiet", even with special silence-oriented cases and heavy dampening. Here I'm just talking about performance.
I tried all this in everyday use. No benchmark, I just rate global system responsiveness with a stopwatch in normal desktop use.
Scsi is obviously the fastest, even without raid, but there is in every application an improvement in raid.
Raptors are a lot slower than scsi, and improvement in raid is less important. Event with standard 7200 rpm drives on a cheapo marvell controller, there is a light improvement in raid.
Globally, in raid0:
-boot up time is almost the same (maybe 1-2 sec faster)
-heavy applications (cs2) loading is slightly faster
-software installation is slightly faster
-games loading is marginally faster
-games framerate is worse unless hardware raid controller
-but large files load/write/copy is really faster!
I agree that the improvement doesn't worth the 2x price.
I agree that a low access time drive is better than 2 slower in raid0.
But I don't agree when people say "no improvement in raid0"!!!
We have talked about performance, and here we come to the silence issue.
I think that when we need a really silent drive (and that means a slow, 2.5", 4200 or 5400 rpm drive), you simply have not other choice than raid0 to improve performance........
Last opinion: no hard drive is fast enough . Hard drive are always the weakest point in a pc. And I think they will always be. When the first 7200 prm drives came to the market (many, many years ago), with their amazing access times (compared to slower ones) I thought "well, finally we'll have almost instantaneous hard drives"... I was wrong, there was some % improvement, but no revolution. Same when 10k drives arrived, then 15k... Manufacturers can build 20k, 25k or 30k if they wish (they don't, they are not crazy, they know that's not the solution), they can make 1tb platters, their drives will always be soooooooo slow compared to the other components of a pc.
Thank to my job, I could try the fastest (and loudest) solutions on the market today, but they are still soooooo slow. The only real improvment I could notice is when using a ssd. That's really fast. That's really silent. That's the future. But my god, how expensive it is !!!
I bet than in 10 years, most of todays hdd manufacturers will have stopped their production. Samsung, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Hitachi will stop hdd drives because it won't be profitable enough. Between wd, maxtor and seagate, the "hdd only" manufacturers, only the strongest financially will eventually survive, and build large storage drives for filing and records...