RAID
RAID cannot provide a performance boost in all applications. This statement is especially true with typical desktop application users and gamers. For most desktop applications and games the buffer strategy and seek performance of the disk(s) are more important than raw throughput. Increasing raw sustained transfer rate shows little gains for such users, as most files that they access are typically very small anyway. Disk striping using RAID 0 increases linear transfer performance, not buffer and seek performance. As a result, disk striping using RAID 0 shows little to no performance gain in most desktop applications and games, although there are exceptions. For desktop users and gamers with high performance as a goal, it is better to buy a faster, bigger, and more expensive single disk than it is to run two slower/smaller drives in RAID 0. Even running the latest, greatest, and biggest drives in RAID-0 is unlikely to boost performance more than 10%, and performance may drop in some access patterns, particularly games.