someone please save me some research and let me know if it's better (faster) to go with RAID or a single SSD?

SSD's in RAID 0 will be extrememy fast. As to mechanical HDDs in RAID 0, it depends on the drives and the SSD that are being compared.

I would say RAID 0 is really not a good idea as it provides zero fault-tolerance. A single SSD would be the better option.

This depends on which hard drives are in RAID and which SSD.

SSD have a huge advantage when seeking, which means loading lots of small files goes very, very fast. That's helpful when booting the OS and loading some programs. They have less of an advantage when loading large files, because there's less seeking, so transferring movie files or loading game textures doesn't benefit as much. At least this info was relevant a few years ago when I built my computer. SSDs are faster and cheaper now.

RAID comes in many levels, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and RAID matrixes (combinations of multiple rain levels)

RAID 0 has fast read and write, but if a drive dies you lose ALL data

RAID 1 has a fast read (same as RAID 0), normal write, and you can lose the parity drive.

RAID 2-5 are nightmares (Anyone who thinks RAID 5 is still good needs to do research on the write hole and failure rate of RAID 5s during a rebuild)

RAID 6 is good, and does partially resolve RAID 5's write whole.

RAID 10 is where it's at (requires 4 drives minimum, you get 1/2 the storage It's two sets of RAID 0, RAID 1'd).

As a general policy, I think avoiding RAID whenever possible is the best option. RAID 10 is the only RAID I would consider for a server.

I say go with an SSD if you want performance.

Thanks for the crash course guys. My decision is made, SSD it is.

Thanks again!

Worse than that, it doubles (or triples, however many drives comprise the array) the risk of failure. I always cringe when I hear of someone using it unless the data in question really is disposable.

RAID1 should theoretically have the same read speed as RAID0 but with the benefit of built-in redundancy. But for random accesses, SSD beats it hands down. Of course a good RAID system with an SSD cache is pretty impressive but it's getting a bit complicated and can be precarious if not configured properly, apparently.