I have been doing some spring cleaning on my system to get my hard drives back in some semblance of order and am weighing my options of "raid-ing" two internal drives together to help relieve the burdeon placed on a single drive containing HD video media.  Is this an advantage or does it really matter?  Is it better to raid to save drive wear or not to raid to keep from loosing two drives worth of data should one fail?  And no, I'm not going to mirror them.

Personally, I'm of the mind that you shouldn't use RAID 0 unless you have a compelling reason to do so.  One stream of HD video can be handled perfectly adequately by a single drive.  Depending on your setup, quite possibly even more.  Figure out what your data rate needs are, and then decide whether you need RAID to meet them or not.  If you can play all your video off a regular hard disk, upgrading to a lighthing fast RAID 0 array won't gain you any performance whatsoever.

And the more points of failure you have, the more likely you are to lose everything without warning.  In terms of disc wear, I suspect that it's actually worse for the discs to be raided, because it means that every continuous read or write would need to access both drives.  I favor JBOD for my media storage, because it minimizes your loss in the event of a drive failure, and probably reduces the drive wear the most (the drives with media on them that aren't being accessed can lie completely idle most of the time.)