2 raid arrays from 2 drives?

You're still going to have the issue that if one drive physically fails, you will lose all data in both arrays.

Raid 1 is meant to be redundant. If 1 drive fails I loose everything on the Raid 0 array but the data on the Raid 1 is still on the other drive.

I assume you want to use RAID 0 to get faster transfer rates and thereby better performance? If so then putting multiple RAID volumes on the same physical drives pretty much defeats the purpose of that, since the head will have to seek back and forth between the two volumes and that will hurt performance.

Sminlal is right about the decreased performance when you are using RAID 1 and RAID 0 on the same pair of disks and you are accessing data on both sets at the same time. However, if you use the RAID 1 for media and RAID 0 for boot/programs, you rarely will have this issue. But, its not likely that the RAID 0 will make life that much better. One case where you will have speed issues is windows backups. This will essentially be copying what you have placed on your boot drive to your storage drive. This will be much slower than you would get if you backed up to a different disk. I tested RAID 0 to RAID 10 copies with matrix raid once though, speed was actually faster than you would thing, but your setup is using less drives and RAID 1 so you might not see good enough performance.

Best answer selected by tom thumb.