k10man :
Joel: I only asked about raid 0 because a buddy of mine told me with a convincing argument (he is typically very convincing) that raid 0 is faster tan SSD. I am not sure I would trust myself running it that way but this is the info he gave me, of course he never mentioned life span of the products when done this way.
RAID 0 is definitely not going to be faster than an SSD by most measures.
You could possbily get a RAID 0 drive to stream data around the disk more quickly (copying a 2 GB file from one folder to another), but a RAID 0 array isn't going to have the near-instantaneous access that you get from an SSD, which is typically how you experience "speed" as it relates to hard drives in your computer. A RAID 0 array still has to spin up the drives and experiences latency because of that. An SSD, with no moving parts, has no such latency.
The best article I have been able to find comparing RAID 0 and SSDs is actually about 2 SSDs in RAID 0 vs. 8 HDDs in RAID 0, so it's not exactly what you're looking for. But even so, the
conclusion says a lot: "The SSDs are better in almost every benchmark with the exception of throughput, which typically scales nicely with the number of drives used. This is where the hard drives won through sheer force of numbers."
Generally, I think the best bet for most users today (with the money for an SSD) is to get a 60-120 GB SSD and a 1 TB (or larger) HDD. Use the SSD for your commonly used programs, store everything else on the HDD.