I am new to RAID and I just ordered a new computer that has 2 250gb drives on RAID-0. I like to keep my programs on a seperate drive from my OS. So, which of the following should I do for best game performance.

1. Install programs on RAID drives and buy a new HD for OS.
2. Install everything on RAID and don't worry about another HD?
3. Any other suggestions.

Thanks in advance for your help.

With Raid 0 if one drive were to fail you would loose ALL data on those two drives. Your best bet would be to buy a 3rd hard drive run the OS and the games off the raid 0 and anything important on the spare drive. Or you can take the drives out of Raid however this will give you less performance.

Does RAID generally fail more often than running your drives seperately? And if I were to put in another drive, would I put the single drive as Master and do the RAID's as cable select?

There is a higher failure rate with RAID0 than with a single drive because as sticks51412 mentioned, one drive failure in a RAID0 array would take out all your data.

Other RAID iterations allow for fault tolerance, however. RAID is more effective for long-term storage solutions with fault tolerance than for performance increases (that comes with RAID0, but with a huge risk of failure if a disk crashes). From your mentioning of Master/Slave settings and cable select, are you thinking of doing RAID on PATA drives?