I like 2 hard drives w/Raid 1, and quarter stroking the HD's

Low price.
Lots of speed.
HD crash protection.

Raid 0 writes faster than Raid 1, but it does not read faster.

So for gameplay it's just as fast as raid 0 except you trade 1/2 of your space for total data protection.

Take a large SATA 7200rpm drive and quarter stroke it for better gameplay results than a much more expensive 10k rpm drive. (note: the 10k will still blow the other drive away when it comes to loading huge files, aka, uncompressed video/etc.)

But then I normally spend ~$500 on computers, I watch the price/performance curve much more than anything else.

I got tired of spending $2+k on a system and then being able to get the same system for ~$500 a year later.