Depends on if you want to use raid 0 and double your speed.

And the 500Gs are alot slower. Get 2 Western Digital 640s, black or blue, not green.

Oh really? Do you have any real proof? Maybe you shouldn't comment on something you know nothing about.

I happen to run raid 0 setups and it does double the speed. What the hell else is the point of raid 0 then all knowing mighty one, cause if it dont double the speed I would like to know what it does do. The programs I run that show double speed must be lying to me.

Next time try Google before you spout off about something you have no idea about.

The 500s Get almost 70MB/s reads

The 640s get 90MB/s, big difference in performance.

Any other benefits of getting two? Or one?

hmm... might go for 1TB drive. Im not planning on going RAID. Unless some of you can convince me of a reason why :>

http://www.overclockercafe.com/Articles/RAID/index.htm

There's a good reason.

Interesting ...

lets say that I buy two 500GB hdd's and I go Raid 0, is it possible to stop using raid after about a year when I would like the storage rather than speed?

Get a 1tb drive.

Simply: the 1tb has more density than the 500gig therefore it is faster by itself. If you want to add another drive and do a raid array later, you'll still have that option.

For daily use, going raid0 simply isn't worth the added risk of data loss + added noise + added heat + added energy use for slightly faster speeds at higher costs.

Now if your name is roadrunner and you like to go fast so that the coyote doesn't catch you, grab a couple of ssd's and raid0 them

the 1tb drives are nice and all but for $/gb get 2x640gb drives they offer better performance than the 500gb drives as well. I have 2x500gb drives that i got a little over a year ago and have had them in raid 0 the entire time. When i set this computer up I did some times compared to my single 500gb drive that i now use as storage and in real world game load times i averaged about 15-25% faster than using 1 drive. Windows actually loads slower since it has to boot the raid driver before going to the desktop but that's no big deal for me since i turn off my pc maybe every 3-4 days or so. Mostly i have video media on here anyways and it seems that it loads that up fairly well though thats a subjective thing I havn't tested it or anything, i could though i suppose i have a drive sitting around here somewhere that has a backup of my raid...

Well the advantage of having 1 drive is you only have 1. Less wattage from running them fewer headaches is one is bad and you were trying to set them up. The disadvantage is that if that one drive fails and you don't have your data backed up...

With 2 drives you have the option of using or not using raid and then if you do use raid you have a few options towards performance or safety. So you could have a boot drive and one as storage and manually back up files from one to the other. Or you could set up raid 0 (has the same amount of data storage as a 1tb drive 500gbx2) and then have slightly better perfarmance. However with 2 drives you double the risk one of them fails and again you loose all your data. Or you can run something like raid 1 that makes an identical copy on each drive so that if one fails you simply replace it with another drive of the same size and then it backs up your data again.

The only reason I want 1TB is for media storage. I have loads of music and videos that I want to store on my PC, and also games that take up a reasonable size of disk space. I want fast read performance, but I also want fault tolerance. In that case RAID 10/01 seems ideal, if it fits into my budget.

Can any of you recommend a fast 320-500GB HDD that works well in RAID 10/01? And does RAID 01 perform better in read than RAID 10?

This was very badly finished imo so I need to make this clear for anyone who reads this in future.
3 Things to know about RAID:

RAID CANNOT be used by all Mobos so don't assume you can use it, check before you even consider it.

RAID 0 - The 2 Drives will combine to make on larger drive, i.e. 500GB x 2 = 1TB, The advantage is double read speed, write speed and cache, the disadvantage is, as said, if one drive fails your data is lost

RAID 1 - Mirroring is a totally different beast, if you have 500GB x2 you only get 500GB of storage but everything is saved twice, the obvious advantage is that if one drivve fails then you lose nothing but one hard drive, the disadvantage is half storage and cache, read and write speed isnt affected as far as I know

Identical HDDs are adviced but apparantly not compulsory