If it is not obvious by now, RAID 0 will provide outstanding results in
synthetic benchmarks but really does nothing in actual applications. We
should probably clarify that statement in detail. Utilizing the best
performing drives in RAID 0 is the setup to have if you are looking to
publish top benchmark scores with results in PCMark05 improving by 25%
as an example. That same setup will provide you with at best minimal
performance improvements in most applications, or sometimes no
difference at all.
[end qoute]
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969&p=9
And from another article on the same site:
[Qoute]
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there
is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The
real world performance increases are negligible at best and the
reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between
failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.
(...)
Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but
they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop
performance. That's just the cold hard truth.
[end quote]
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
Claims of performance increases in the 100% range are specious or
dubious to say the least!
John