Best setup between 2x640GB and 1x500GB drive

[Jimmy the Greek]

I'm going to pick up two of the new WD 640GB drives, and use my WD 500GB in an eSATA external enclosure.

Whenever I reformat, my backup consists of the following (around 50GB total):
-Music
-Documents
-Savegames
-Firefox and Thunderbird data

The rest of my data consists primarily of games, which I reinstall. With this in mind, which setup sounds best for me?

[thebeephaha]

I picked RAID 1 because honestly... over a TB of anything in RAID 0 just scares me even if its backed up and non important data.

[knob]

I'm on with RAID 0. If you haven't worked with a striped raid before, you'll likely be surprised by the improvement in performance.

Re reliability: yes, the risk of losing your data doubles... but, i haven't had a WD fail.... and I own one of the new 640GB drives... and I'd pair it up in a stripe in a second (if I weren't going to shell out for VRs later haha).

[Jimmy the Greek]

I'm on with RAID 0. If you haven't worked with a striped raid before, you'll likely be surprised by the improvement in performance.

Noticeably better than a single Raptor 150 in real-world usage? I'm using one of those right now. Performance isn't my #1 priority, but I don't want too big of a downgrade.

[Jimmy the Greek]

For specifics, I use 520GB between my four HDDs. Half of that is rarely accessed and can be moved to the enclosure.

Approximating the 640s to 600GB, that would leave me with 940GB (RAID-0) or 340GB (RAID-1), so space isn't a huge issue. It comes down to whether the performance of RAID-0 justifies the lack of redundancy.

BTW, I've read that RAID-1 is significantly louder because of the writes to two drives. In your experience, is this true?

[knob]

Noticeably better than a single Raptor 150 in real-world usage?

Probably - better STR than the single Raptor, nominally worse access times (7200RPM < 10k RPM).

A couple years ago, I started with having 2 of the Raptor 360GDs in a stripe, and could tell a difference when I added 2 more 360GDs a couple months later. YMMV.