Is RAID 0 as risky as people say it is?

I'm just about to set up my hard drives with RAID 0. Is it really as risky as people say it is?

RAID 0 doubles your chance of storage failure (assuming a 2-disk Raid 0). Why? Because now you are relying on the reliability of 2 disks, instead of just one.

RAID 10 brings back a reasonable level of reliability.

RAID 0 means ZERO redundancy. Whenever there is data to be written to the RAID device, it is split in two, the first part is written onto the first disk, the second part on the second, which makes your write operation pretty fast. But if either disk breaks, all your data is lost (since you lose (roughly) 50% of all your files, rendering all of them useless)

Yes. If you lose just one drive in the array, you lose everything. Which means anything on RAID 0 must have a backup.

It depends on what you are using it for. As others have said it roughly doubles the risk of failure of the data on it compared to a single disk. If you had 3 disks in raid 0, then 3x the risk, etc... This because you lose almost all data if any one disk fails. RAID operates on a low level, so it doesn't generally put one file on one disk and another file on the other disk, but rather will generally split up the file between the however many disks.

However, If you have a backup, and it is static data, and uptime doesn't really matter, then it is not dangerous. For instance, I might use raid 0 on a gaming machine with my save files on another disk. This way, level loads will be fast :-) But for IT appropriate uses, its not the ideal choice.

An IT situation would be redundant machines with static data. In this case, it is okay for a machine to go down for a while.

Lastly, hard drives are mechanical, and break quite often. You might not see this if you just have a couple of desktops, but with a server room and lots of disks, you will be replacing them fairly often.