elitose :
For real world performance is dual ssd raid zero worth the added risk of data loss and the financial investment?
An old thread, but since it was at the top of my Google search, maybe others are still visiting too.
There are three issues in the OP's question: data loss risk, financial investment, and performance.
As mitch-ogb notes, there are multiple ways to reduce the chance of data loss, and one should employ as many of these as practicable. I would expect drive failure at some point, regardless of the setup, but not the exponentially higher fail rates shown. For instance, www.raid-failure.com estimates (pessimistically, I might add) the 1-year and 5-year survival rates of one drive as 98 percent and 70 percent, respectively, and the survival rates for two drives in RAID 0 as 97 percent and 49 percent.
To me, if there were significant gains in performance and no great additional cost, then the setup would be worth it. If you are setting up software RAID, then the only additional immediate cost is for a second drive. However, because the two drives will work as one, this is not necessarily a great expense. If you were going to buy one 500~GB drive, you can now buy two 250~GB drives. Small drives often become cheaper per GB when larger drives are available.
So the real question of worth is in performance. Unfortunately, although you may get good benchmark scores on certain functions, that is no guarantee that you will actually experience any significant performance gains. Sometimes, setting up a faster hard drive or RAID merely exposes the weakness of an inexpensive or aging processor, shifting the bottleneck from slow HDDs to a slow processor. If your daily tasks are disk-intensive but rarely if ever max out the processor, then you could see some performance increase. However, if your processor is going full-tilt as you edit video or the like, then having a faster hard drive setup is not likely going to result in the perception of any performance improvement.
I have an older system and have maxed out the processor for the particular motherboard. I do not believe RAID 0 would make a difference in real-world performance. If you're like me and like to tinker with things, then it might be fun, but if you're doing it because you really have a need for speed, then I expect you may be disappointed.