I have seen quite a lot of posts asking if RAID 0 will make the drives any faster. So, I thought I'd just shed some light on this, if could help you.

* Firstly, RAID 0 has NO REDUNDANCY AT ALL. If one of the drives in the RAID set fails, you loose all your data.
* RAID 0 is really only used to join a few smaller disks into 1 larger disk. So, instead of having 3 drives, and 3 seperate partitions, you could join them all together, and get 1 large virtual drive, which your OS will see as 1 drive only. I would highly recommend that you still partition your drive, even if just to keep your OS on a seperate partition from your data, which will make it easier if you want to reinstall your OS, without loosing your data.
* The speed increase you'll get is minimal, and I almost want to gaurentee you that you won't notice it on a standard desktop system. Only on very expensive RAID cards will you really see the difference.

To use hardware RAID or Software RAID?
Unless you have purchased an expensive Xeon server motherboard, your motherboard doesn't have hardware RAID, but fakeRAID / software RAID, where it uses the main CPU & RAM for RAID management. Using your BOIS to manage your RAID has only 1 advantage, you don't need to understand RAID's. And it's limited to Windows ONLY. Linux & UNIX won't work properly with the fakeRAID, so rather disable it in the BIOS, and setup RAID with the OS itself. The advantage is, you'll learn more & have more control over it.


Lastly, RAID IS NOT A BACKUP DEVICE. RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 5, RAID 6, etc will increase your chances of keeping the data on your PC / server safe when you have a drive failure, but it won't protect your data from corruption, viruses, deletion, etc. You'll still need seperate offsite backup set.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0