Go with RAID 0 or No?

So recently I got myself a brand spanking new computer. I can finally play Vanguard without lag! So, anyway it was set up with a RAID 0 with a 64k stripe for speed since it is my gaming machine. The RAID contained two 80GB Maxtor SATA drives. A RAID 0 stripes data across multiple disks and can read and write to those multiple disks simultaneously, providing better performance. However if one of those drives goes bad, so does your data. Now when I set up the RAID, I promised myself that I would not put any data on it, for fear of failure. Well as the story goes one of the drives has failed, and I have family photos all over my desktop.

In another article I had preached that RAID 0 is wonderful, and I still feel that way, I would just make sure that you have a dedicated drive in the machine for your important data. I only wrote this to show you all that even someone who KNOWS better tends to not back up their data, and makes what I feel was a silly mistake of not keeping the data in a safer place, so don’t feel bad if you make a mistake with your data, I do it all the time.

Fortunately I work for one of the best RAID Data Recovery companies out there, but if you don’t happen to work for one, then back up your data!