Building a machine

[LochnarITB]

Yes.  In fact, in order to use RAID for data redundancy you must have 3 or more equal drives.  Most games are not IO bound, but if your application of choice is say burning CD's or DVD's from HD then IO speed might be important.  To use RAID 0 you need only two equal drives.

Aren't we talking RAID 0 versus RAID 1? Both require 2 drives of equal size. The first provides storage equal to twice the drive size split between the 2 drives for IO speed. The second provides storage equal to the single drive but provides data redundancy by having an exact duplicate on the second drive. As you said, most games should not be IO bound with sufficient memory for caching so I just don't understand why anyone even considers RAID 0. It just seems to add one more physical system that can go wrong and errors on one drive essentially negate both drives. I also question whether burning optical disks is a valid reason for the extra speed. Burning an optical disk is much more akin to a mechanical process than electronic so it will never keep up to the electronic process of reading the magnetic signal from the hard drive. If I were building a box, especially given my recent experiences, I would seriously consider RAID 1 but not 0. In effect, I am doing almost the same with my laptop by using an external USB/Firewire hard drive and doing frequent backups to it.

[edit] Oops, forgot to add this link for Occhi. It seems like a good overview of RAID and I am sure there are many others out there to be found.

RAID Explained