Best RAID 0 Solution for Me?

I've read the FAQ here, searched here and abroad, and I can't figure out what to do.

I just ordered a PC from Avadirect which has a fast SSD for my OS and programs (Samsung 840 Pro 512GB), and a Z87 motherboard that has plenty of SATA III ports in addition to dual Thunderbolt ports.

My main application is photography, and this machine will need to use a Lightroom collection of photos that takes up about 1.2TB of space. I can speed things up a lot by keeping the image previews on the SSD, but that still leaves 1.2TB of photos that I need to keep on a hard drive. I have a Crucial 960GB SSD, but it's not big enough for this.

Currently that 1.2TB of photos is on an external USB 3.0 drive (Seagate Backup Pro), and it's a surprisingly fast drive. I'm getting noticeably faster image transfers to that drive than I was previously getting with an internal WD Green HDD. Atto was indicating ~100MB/s transfers with the WD drive and closer to 180MB/s with the external Seagate, and the difference was pretty obvious. Now I want to go for even better performance, and that's how I came to think about RAID.

My first thought was to get the Drobo 5D since my motherboard has Thunderbolt, but I'm reading that the transfer speeds on that device aren't so hot. The Promise Pegasus external RAID devices are priced out of my budget, which is under $1k. The WD Velociraptor Duo Thunderbolt looks perfect for my needs, with people saying it has transfer speeds ~350MB/s in RAID 0. However, WD doesn't have Windows drivers yet to support RAID with that device.

So, my thoughts turned to some sort of internal RAID 0 setup. I read that hardware RAID is the way to go, but all the RAID cards I found that had good reviews also said that they are meant for servers and can get very hot in regular PCs. Also, none were specific about whether they support Z87 motherboards, Windows 8 Pro, etc. So, my thoughts went back to software RAID.

Will using the software RAID 0 via my motherboard give me transfer speeds of over 300MB/s using two Seagate Barracuda drives that independently give transfer speeds close to 180GB/s? I back up religiously - to external drives in multiple locations, to the cloud, to printed photos, etc, so I'm not worried about my RAID array going down and losing my data.

If you made it through, thanks for reading this far, and I'd appreciate some advice and information about the fastest 2GB or greater storage I can buy for up to $1k including RAID controller and drives.

In case it matters, here are the specs for the system I ordered via Avadirect:

SELECTED COMPONENTS
FRACTAL DESIGN, Define R4 Black Pearl w/ Window Silent Mid-Tower Case, ATX, No PSU, Plastic/Steel
SEASONIC, SS-660XP 660W Power Supply w/ Modular Cables, 80 PLUS® Platinum, 24-pin ATX12V 2x EPS12V, 4x 8/6-pin PCIe, Retail
ASUS, Z87-Deluxe/Dual, LGA1150, Intel® Z87, DDR3-3000 (O.C.) 32GB /4, PCIe x16 SLI CF /1+1*, SATA 6Gb/s RAID 5 /10, 2x TB + HDMI, USB 3.0 /6+2, HDA, WiFi, BT, GbLAN /2, ATX, Retail
INTEL, Core™ i7-4770 Quad-Core 3.4 - 3.9GHz TB, HD Graphics 4600, LGA1150, 8MB L3 Cache, DDR3-1600, 22nm, 84W, EIST HT vPro VT-d VT-x XD, Retail
COOLER MASTER, Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler, Socket 2011/1155/1156/1366/775/FM1/AM3/AM2, 159mm Height, Copper/Aluminum
COOLER MASTER, ThermalFusion 400 Thermal Compound, Electrically Non-Conductive
CRUCIAL, 16GB (2 x 8GB) Ballistix Sport PC3-12800 DDR3 1600MHz CL9 (9-9-9-24) 1.5V SDRAM DIMM, Non-ECC
EVGA, GeForce® GTX 660 933MHz, 2GB GDDR5 6008MHz, PCIe x16 SLI, DP + HDMI + 2 x DVI, Retail
SAMSUNG, 512GB 840 Pro Series SSD, MLC Samsung MDX, 540/520 MB/s, 2.5-Inch, 7mm, SATA 6 Gb/s, Retail
SEAGATE, 2TB Barracuda®, SATA 6 Gb/s, 7200 RPM, 64MB cache
RAID, No RAID, Independent HDD Drives
LITE-ON, iHAS124 Black 24x DVD±RW Dual-Layer Burner, SATA, OEM
MICROSOFT, Windows 8 64-bit Edition, OEM w/ Media
WARRANTY, Silver Warranty Package (3 Year Limited Parts, 3 Year Labor Warranty)

Thank you both. The drive I need is for storage of my photos as I work on them but will be backed up continuously to another external drive as well as backed up daily to the cloud and a third offsite drive. I separately keep backups of my daily photos on SD cards and on a fourth drive, so I am really not worried about losing my work or data to the RAID 0 drive.

In order to use Samsung 840 Pro drives, I would need to RAID at least 3 or 4 of the 512GB drives, and that's getting into big bucks for me. I thought about buying two more of the Crucial 960GB drives and using those, but that's a little more than I want to spend also.

The 180MB/s I quoted for my current HDD may be wrong. I was basing it on ATTO benchmark, and I don't know if it's a peak transfer speed or sustained transfer speed they report, but ATTO on default settings says that for 64k and higher, I'm getting both read and write transfer rates of ~180MB/s and above. That Seagate Backup Plus drive uses a 2TB Barracuda, so I'm pretty sure the same bare drive would do as well or slightly better as an internal drive.

If we assume I'm wrong about the 180GB/s number (numerous people have said that I must be wrong about this), let's just say that I'm fairly happy with the speed I'm getting from my USB 3 enclosure which contains a Seagate Barracuda drive. If I take two of those drives and do motherboard RAID 0 with them, is it safe to say that I'll get noticeably better performance out of them? Also, if I do mootherboard RAID, am I better off using enterprise drives like RE or Constellation?

I'm fine with doing hardware RAID if someone can suggest a controller that is easy to use, doesn't get excessively hot, and will work with my hardware and OS.

Thanks again!

I'd like a total of at least 2TB of fast storage and want to spend under $1k for it. The two 960GB Crucial drives will cost me a little over budget.

Thanks (!), and sorry for giving best answer too early. I'm new to this community and thought it was impolite to wait too long...