Two hard drives or one

[grumbler]

160GB in RAID 0 vice 160 in one drive is just double the (small) failure rate with an inconsequential improvement in speed.  One drive for sure.

It's a solid state drive. It has nowhere near the failure rate you expect from hard drives traditionally--which are basically guaranteed to fail eventually. 

Duh!

Although I haven't had an actual physical failure on a hard drive (other than manufacturing flaws, and they can exist on any drive) in years.

It's like going from a 5% likelihood to fail to a 0.0001% likelihood. You're gonna complain when you bump it all the way up to 0.0002%? 

Way to make up some numbers! 

Nevertheless, having two drives in RAID 0 has twice the failure rate of one drive, and with these drives being solid state, and much faster than you expect from standard hard drives, the improved access speed gained by RAID won't be noticeable under any circumstances, while the lower reliability may be noticeable under some circumstances.

In this case, I wouldn't bother with RAID if I had two drives.  I'd partition one into root and applications drives, and use the other for data storage.

[Darth Wagtaros]

I've seen quite a few hard drives die.  Some were almost new. 

My real question here is would the RAID 0 really boost performance at all?  I bet a SSD would run pretty damned fast on its own. 

[grumbler]

My real question here is would the RAID 0 really boost performance at all? 

Yes, at least in theory.  Probably not enough so that a human would notice, though.

I bet a SSD would run pretty damned fast on its own.

My point exactly.