To be honest, I use both on my box. My C: drive is a RAID-0 system (continually imaged each week in case of failure), and my Data drive (for me it’s K:) is a RAID-1 system. But if you only used RAID-0, as long as you have a backup and quick recovery mechanism, it’s often worth it. As your only personal PC for your home then it’s definitely not a good option. But as a developer box, the cost of recovery is often worth the benefits. Especially if you get into some heavy enterprise applications

In addition to this, mostly because I’ve experience too many drive failures in the past, everything that’s critical is backed up to an external drive for all machines. We also have a dedicated backup computer that’s got a large RAID-1 system. It’s worth every penny if you have to use it just once.

In addition to this, we also have an external drive which stores another copy at another location (another part of town). This way should something happen to the building where the computers are stored, then it’s a quick recovery.

And as if that isn’t enough, we also pay for a service which remotely backs up our critical data at some remote location online. This last part is mainly for things like the code repository, etc.

For those of you interested, I wrote an article a while back on how to increase your odds of a successful recovery from a disk failure here. For a drive failure, you can’t know how true the old adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” until you experience one (or many).