im thinking about use 2 250 gig SATA2 hard drives in RAID 0. can some one please give me the pros and cons of this

Cons:
You double the odds of losing all your data to drive failure.
Cheap fakeraid controllers can be flaky and "forget" the RAID configuration sometimes.
You increase the system load (not much on modern machines), because fakeraid lives on your CPU.

Pros:
It's fast.
You get a nice big logical disk to work with.

is it worth doing, i have never had a drive fail on me, its not a big deal to me to reinstall windows

I've had a RAID 0 for years now with no problems except for the ones I've created. It'll only help you when loading programs or game maps into memory. Programs and maps load slightly faster.

I do play a few competitive on-line games where map load times can determine what class or weapon I play. The speed of my processor plus the advantage of my RAID array always allow me to pick the weapon or class I want because I'm always first on the map.

As far as "fake-raid" is concerned, it's only truly possible to get "real-raid" with a server motherboard and 64bit PCI-X or 64bit PCI slots. Those add in cards that allow "real-raid" are very expensive, usually $350.00 or more, and don't work or only work at half speed in a 32bit PCI slot.

You can always add a third hard drive, separate from your RAID array, to your computer, so you can periodically back-up your array with software like Norton Ghost if you're truly worried about losing data.

It's also possible to dramatically reduce drive failure by cooling your drives with a fan!

thankz for your input Cinders, i have 2 120mm fans in my case, one of them is blowing air above and below my hard drive, the other one is in the back blowing air out. + my room stays about 15c -17c all year long.

Main Pro would be fault tollerance. RAID-0 can withstand 1x Disk failure.
Speed too is a great Pro.

Major Con obviously is the fact you lose a whole disk. But well worth it in my eyes.

Go for a hardware RAID controller rather than software RAID also.

Somone needs to read up on RAID before posting misinformation (or just read the thread before replying). RAID0 has no fault tolerance whatsoever.

Seems like we need to have some evaluation system. It's a pity Karma had to pulled off (possibly because of some misuse)

Nodsu is right mikescorpio81, Raid 0 is just striping, across the 2 disks, thus increasing performance.
Raid 1 will mirror data and offer redundancy if one disks fails.
Raid 5 does both.

lol @ mike, im glad i got my raid 0 going, i would be upset if i read that post.

Is it possible to set up a raid 0 array once the OS is already installed?

sounds good, i guess i will use RAID 0

Sorry! RAID-1 I meant (mirroring)