Quote Originally Posted by Particle View Post
RAID-0 will actually increase access time, not decrease it. It also doesn't generally help for small or random I/O. For general-purpose stuff, you'll often find yourself a little bit slower when using a stripe. If you're doing uncompressed video captures or something, then it makes sense. It does also increase the chance of total data loss, since one drive in the stripe kills the whole thing. If you want to improve reliability, you need RAID3/5/6 which are all stripes with parity. RAID 3 and 5 let you have one disk die without disruption. RAID 6 lets you have two. All three give you the benefits of a stripe (sequential I/O improvement and increased capacity) without some of the worries (increased chance of data loss) but still have some (higher access times). They also require a decent controller to get good performance.
RAID 0 does help small random IO as long as IO size is smaller than stripe width (by at least stripe size).

Don't forget about RAID 10. It's sometimes better than 3/5/6.