Q: Is there a real world performance? ie Windows and applications run faster, or the advantage only in file transfer?
Best Answer: RAID 0 turns TWO hard drives into one. If you buy two 200 GB HD's, Windows will see them as one 400 GB hard drive. And yes, it makes all hard drive access twice as fast, both reading from and writing to them.
Re:Also, I believe the access time for RAID 0 is lower than when the drives are running solo.
Re:I think your statistics are a bit off there, guy.
How do you figure the MTBF gets cut in half?
If the avg. MTBF is 50,000 (+- variance, lets say 2000 hours), one drive isn't going to suddely fail in half the time…you just have 2 drives with an avg. 50,000 MTBF. One drive may fail @ 48,000 or 51,000 hours–whatever, the other not at all (of course this is assuming neither are defective), but you don't halve the MTBF just because there are two drives.
That's like saying if your odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 16,000,000, but with two tickets it's only 1 in 8,000,000.
That's not right, you just have 2 chances out of 16,000,000 of winning.
If that did work, I'd be buying a helluva lot of tickets. 
~AJ
Re:RAID-0 does NOT improve reliability, in fact it makes it worse; if you run a RAID-0 array on a pair of discs with MTBF of 50,000 hours, the MTBF of the array is 25,000 hours. RAID-1 improves reliability and should improve performance too, but of course at the cost of disc space; a RAID-1 of two 45GB discs gives you 45GB space.
Re:A friend of mine had better results with installing and opening large files. Starting windows and most applications were about the same… I think where it is at Well, IDE raid anyways, is more for braggin rights and reliability than anything else…
Re:You probably wouldn't see any performance increase if you weren't dealing with large files. Performance might even be worse in some applications.
I think there are a few more detailed discussions about RAID0… try a search on 'RAID'.
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