RAID 1: Worth it?

[Onus]

Hey all,
I am building a computer and am reaching the home stretch. I have been toying with the idea of installing two Seagate barracuda es.2 250gb 32mb in a RAID 1 array. Now, considering this will just be a gaming computer, is this a worthwhile idea? My mobo has SATA 3, and I have a 700w psu, so the hardware concerns are minimal. Will the increase in speed be noticeable?
Thanks!

[Freakitchen]

RAID 1 is mirroring - the entire contents of the first drive will be mirrored onto the second for backup purposes. This will give you no speed increase. Have a look at this Wiki to understand some of the details

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

My advice? Don't do RAID at all for a standard gaming computer. The low speed increases given by RAID 0 are simply not worth the risk of data loss; if one drive, or your array fails, you've lost the data on both drives. If you want a backup solution, consider an external hard drive and backup software that will allow you to select specific files/folders to backup.

[glc]

I also don't recommend the ES2 drives for a gaming computer. They are enterprise drives designed for data security, not speed. Get the Barracuda 7200.11 drives.

[Freakitchen]

Wanted to add also that, if you do decide to ditch RAID, then you'll get more value for money out of a single, larger capacity drive. 500GB is in the 'sweet spot' right now.

[David M]

I would not bother using RAID 1 for a computer used just for gaming. If you lose where you were in a game, so what. You can always reload a game with relative ease and play from the beginning of the game back to the point you were before the drive crashed. If you have lots of games where you don't want to lose the places where you were at, then its pretty much a personal decision. I have RAID 1 because I have three operating systems loaded on the same HD that I would dread having to reload.

[Onus]

Thanks for the advice guys! It was not easy trying to find hard numbers or side by sides of RAID/Non-RAID systems, and a little experienced advice was what I wanted.