raid 0 vs single ssd, which one to go for?

Recently I purchased two Vaio VPC-SA laptops from Sonystyle.

First one is a Refurbished VPC-SA490X ($1255.78 including tax) featuring 256gb SSD (raid0).

Second one is a brand-New VPC-SA390X ($992.55 including tax as a clearance sale) featuring 750gb 5400rpm HDD (plan to replace it with a 256gb single ssd)

Both laptops have the highest i7 cpus.

I am going to return one. Which one to keep?

I believe that the brand-new one is a better deal, since it comes with one year warranty, while the refurbished one comes with only 90 days.

But, the speed of the SSD in raid0 is fantastic and I believe I would not be able to get it with a single SSD.

The below is the benchmark result of SA-490X (raid0)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : Crystal Dew World
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 943.247 MB/s
Sequential Write : 499.798 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 457.345 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 622.657 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 18.426 MB/s [ 4498.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 43.146 MB/s [ 10533.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 336.686 MB/s [ 82198.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 213.819 MB/s [ 52201.8 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 23.4% (52.5/224.3 GB)] (x5) <All 0x00, 0Fill>
Date : 2012/08/01 0:17:19
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

 

You won't be able to get the sequential speeds but that doesn't matter. A single 256GB drive should be able to get the same random 4K speeds and general snappiness.

 

If i would you i would return the raid0, you never going to take advantage of those speeds in real life. Regular ssd is more than enough and you got one year warranty for peace of mind.