Why RAID-anything in a laptop? A single Intel SSD is pretty darn fast, and the second bay is more useful as a large-capacity spinning hard drive (unless you need the optical drive, of course). I have my MBP set up this way and I've been very pleased with it.

Hey Tim! I was just at Ignition Alley today, in the loud room, working on this post.

I have lots of backups in place - files I don't touch in more than a week get moved to S3, as well as Time Machine and a working clone of the drive made every week.

That being said, RAID 0 gives me more space and is faster for reads and writes (that are larger than the block size that is)! Risky indeed though. I touched up on this aspect at the end of the article, and also noted that this setup will only exist on my MBP for 9 mons or so, at which point I'll upgrade to some faster SSDs.

IIRC, Intel specify a lifetime of at least 5 years for "normal use", with a warranty of 3 years. In my experience, you're pretty lucky if your laptop hard disk lasts 5 years; of course, the SSDs haven't been out for that long, so who knows.

RAID-1 is a (very expensive in this case) waste of space when you already have a perfectly good backup system in place.