PC hobbyists (and even the occasional mac nut) should find this extremely comprehensive SATA RAID chipset test of interest. The conclusion: chipset RAID 0 will definitely give you a performance boost, but not the gigantic one people (like me) thought it did.

However, super-large hard drives are so cheap now (I paid $130 for 2 ultra-fast 40 giggers), it's not like the boost comes dearly. I'm still glad I did it, even though it played hell with my Linux install.