Raid 0 Real time benefits

Having a hard time finding any articles that explain real world practicality of raid 0 in a home/gaming environment.

This question is mainly directed at dragoonseal, seems his knowledge of raid 0 is pretty extensive.

I'm still struggling with the thought of raid 0 and the entire trim dilemma. Ive read reviews and articles and all people have to say is how much there drives have slowed without trim.

My purchasing fate rests upon this question, either way I am ready to pull the trigger on 2 160s or 1 300 g3. Thanks in advance!

You're not going to get nearly as much benefit as going from a HDD to a SSD, obviously, even just a single SSD is fast enough that not many things will fully tax them with typical home desktop usage. In RAID most any I/O will be at least a little faster, but where you'll get the most benefit will be heavy load stuff, such as loading games, loading new game maps, booting, transferring large files or lots of little ones, extracting/unzipping files, and any other oddly I/O heavy task. You'll also appreciate it more the heavier your multitasking is, from lack of getting bogged down.

Performance degradation isn't an issue with Intel or Micron SSDs, even without TRIM support. I used to bench my drives a lot but gave up after awhile because it was always the same story, I hadn't done any benchmarks for over half a year but a few days ago I happened to and sure enough same performance. They kept peak performance for a few months but then they slowly slipped into a steady state performance medium and write speeds have dropped about 25% from fresh peak scores and held ever since (about a year now). Read speeds are unaffected. In fact, when I benched them the other day it was probably the highest I've ever seen the read speeds, which was amusing (due to Intel RST driver updates). Don't worry about TRIM. The only downside to RAID is the increased chance of data loss, performance will always be greater than a single drive.

The Intel 320 series has both TRIM support when applicable (non-RAID) and GCing, just like every other modern SSD. TRIM support just helps the GCing, it's useless by itself.