Which is faster, RAID 1 or RAID 0?

[puddpunk]

Hi there,

I was thinking about creating a RAID for my Gentoo system to install on. I can get an identical disk to mine for very cheap indeed. Anyway, It is a Seagate 5400 40Gb disk. Now I've been looking at the kernel's software RAID, and was wondering (since I can't seem to find a decent source of this information) which RAID level (out of 1 or 0) gives the best performance.

If I choose RAID 0, 80Gb would be nice, but one of the disks were under heavy use, and if it dies, i'm in the shit. Although my data isn't that important, and I do frequent backups, it's a pain.

If I choose RAID 1, I get redundancy so my data is not lost, but I only get 40Gb.

So, neither of the cons for both RAID levels really bother me, so which one gives better performance?

Thanks,
Chris.

[mpsii]

RAID 0 for speed, RAID 1 for data security... PCWorld and MaximumPC have done extensive testing on this topic
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Michael

[easykill]

RAID-1 works for redundancy...it will save you if a drive dies, since data is written something like this: