overclocking and financial investment

[iluvgillgill]

or you can do JBOD mode.

 

[V3NOM]

not if i only got one drive >.<

 

[aevm]

and with the whole "extra risk with raid 0! scream, run and hide!", well, if you had a single drive and it failed you lose all your files as well! i guess if you had two drives in RAID 1 would be the argument, but in my case its either one or two for the same capacity

Read this if you want:
http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

There's a chart on page 4 showing how often Google's hard drives failed. It's like 2% in the first year, 8%, 9%, 6%, 7% in the following years. Of course, those are enterprise disks used 24/7, while you're using consumer disks, probably less than 12 hours a day, so your numbers may be different. With RAID 0 you're doubling the chances of failure, but even so I think the numbers are acceptable. With proper backup procedures, it shouldn't be a problem.

JBOD with 2 drives has some advantages too. Let's say you've got a large video on drive C: and create a compressed version on drive D:. If drives C and D are just partitions on the same physical disk, the performance will be horrible. You get a "butterfly" behavior where the read/write heads keep moving from source to destination and back. It's slow, noisy, and can reduce the drive's lifetime too.

 

[V3NOM]

yeah, i don't like to make partitions... don't see the need unless you're dual booting.

 

[zeroyb]

To OP, in electronics, the value for the buck always goes down exponentially as you spend more. This has always been true due the pricing schemes (premiums on high-end stuff). And it's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. So, if you want best bang for the buck that will last a couple of years, always your best bet is 1 or 2 steps down from the top. Sure, you'll be missing out on those CPUs with unlocked multipliers and ultra overclockable mobos. But, the again, the glory from those goodies usually only last several months before a new, improved hardware tops it anyway. That being said, I'd never buy the low-end stuff either, as they tend to not last long. So, they actually don't turn out to be a bargain.