Fyron said:
A mirrored array (RAID 1) provides read performance improvements. The write performance loss is irrelevant outside of a heavy-performance server environment, given the high speeds of disk I/O with modern drives anyways.
Assuming that you are using matching disks, the improvements in read and losses in write performance should be marginal, and likely not noticeable outside of benchmarks.
Fyron said:
NEVER use a basic striped array without parity (RAID 0)! You will lose all of your data when one drive dies. Lack of fault tolerance is worse than useless in a RAID array.
Well, never say "never".
Disk drive failure is going to be a far rarer occurence for a home user than a software install gone wrong or malware messing up a Windows setup (assuming Narf doesn't have a pair of
DeathStars). A 2-drive stripe does double that chance but with a regular backup, the advantages of performance should outweigh the (still very small) risk of data loss.