Tacos, what you say rings the truth. Raid and not Raid are not the same and cannot be compared as such. But I think most peeps who use or wish to try Raid 0 do not view Raid as a Redundant Array of Independent Discs, but rather as 'two hard drives are faster than one', which is true. Obvious to anyone who has data they wish to keep that Raid 0 is an apple, just as to someone who has a couple drives in Raid 0 just for games, he has oranges. lol
I personally don't trust a single large drive any more than I trust a Raid array drive, whether it be 0 or not. I have had more than one drive up and die, erm, more often just lose it's mbr and get flaky. So, to speak of data integrity, single drives IMO are no better than Raid 0 if the term is "die" as in hardware failure.
Now, you may be speaking of "die" as in "my stupid array just got fooked again", so, heh heh, Raid 0 has a tendency to do, maybe sometimes lol.
I think the dead horse is being kicked over and over again because when John Doe neighbor comes to my house, and sees how fast maybe a game loads up, he says "wow, what's under the hood". I say this and that, Raid 0. Or he reads something online. Either way, his interest has been pricked. So off he goes with a general assumption that 'two drives are better than one'. And this is primarily, IMO, because most average users who get a little bit adventuresome, will not geek out for 2 weeks reading white papers on the different Raid levels, much less spend another 2 weeks studying what latency or seek time is. Most don't even get so far as to really comprehend that when some benchmark app says "220mbsec" that it is usually not a real world value, that is manipulated. They see ATA133 as "133mb/sec".
My experience anyway with fixing and building puters is that they learn just a little tiny bit, lose interest, and leave it at that. Sometimes you get teh neighber who asks a LOT of questions and then does some research and then gives me a great tidbit of data that I had not seen before, but I bet that is 1 in 50 that goes to that level.
my 2 cents on a perhaps well trodden topic, but one still of great interest to many upgraders.
later.