Well, look at it like this. What can kill a single drive?
- Power supply surge can kill electronics or cause an inadvertant write to the platters.
- Extreme temperatures can affect bearings and associated spin speed, ruining data that is written at the time.
- Cabling malfunctions can cause all sorts of havoc.
- Shock can knock heads out of alignment or cause physical damage inside the drive.
- Bad sectors (from internal contamination, degradation of the magnetic material, head crash, etc.) will lose data.
Now, the purpose of a RAID array is fault tolerance. RAID levels 1 and up can handle any of those things to a single drive. There is redundancy in the system that will allow a single drive to be replaced for any reason and then the data on that drive to be rebuilt.
RAID 0 has no fault tolerance. Anything that takes out a single drive takes out data on the entire array.
If you look at it that way, then there's no situation that can affect a RAID 0 any more than it would affect a single drive. The difference is that by definition, a single drive has some small chance of any of the problems occurring, while the RAID 0 array has X times that chance, where X is the number of drives in the array. In other words, if a single drive could be expected to fail by one of those mechanisms once every 4 years, and you build a 4-drive RAID 0 array out of those drives, then you can expect the array to fail and lose all data once a year. The fact that you're using 4 drives instead of one opens you up to 4 times the chance of a problem.
Note that this is a different situation that if I have 4 drives in my computer that are individual drives, not in a RAID 0. Using the same drive as we used above which can be expected to fail once every 4 years, I also can expect one of my drives to fail every year. But without them being in a RAID 0, I don't lose all data, I only lose the data on the drive that fails. If that's a drive that has unimportant data on it or data that's backed up somewhere else, then I have no problem.
The purpose of most RAID arrays is to protect from hard drive failure (RAID levels 1 and up), and even more so (and this is frequently not mentioned) to keep the system online and operational when a drive fails. This is a main reason why RAID is used in servers, and only secondarily to protect against hard drive failure. Servers are generally backed up through some kind of backup system (usually tape). Single drives would then be fine if all you were worried about was hard drive failure, but you don't want the server down while you recover. Thus RAID.
The purpose of a RAID 0 array is different - it is purely for speed considerations. There is no fault tolerance, so if important data needs to be stored on it, it obviously needs to be backed up somewhere else.