Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth.
On Windows yes, especially XP.
On Windows the RAID0 performance gain is only sequential throughput increase; the random IOps gains are virtually non-existent; unlike RAID0 on other operating systems which can scale up to 100%.
So a better conclusion would be "RAID on Windows platforms loses most additional performance gained from striping". Microsoft obviously doesn't care about RAID; it decided to only basically implement it, and cripple it for millions of users.
To see what RAID0 is capable of, you would need to be running Linux or BSD. There you can see hefty performance increases with each disk added; like it should be.
The two prime reasons for lower windows stripe performance:
- windows XP and below creates misaligned partitions, crippling all non-sequential RAID performance
- Windows onboard RAID drivers often transfer the whole stripe block, even if only 4 kilobytes was requested. This makes large stripesizes perform poorly, which means you never get optimal striping performance under Windows.
RAID0 or interleaving is a great technology, and it is used everywhere:
- multicore CPUs
- SLI graphic cards
- Dual Channel memory
- Solid State Drive multiple channels (i.e. one Intel SSD = like a 10-disk RAID0 internally)
- multi-lane PCIe
- network link aggregation
- etc