Not my girlfriend, but my sister-in-law.
My brother gave me the money, and I built her machine -- a Xmas gift.
It was in the earlier days of SATA-150 drives, and I chose to install a hardware IDE RAID controller and set up her RAID0. All in all, we've had five systems in the fam-dam-ily with RAID0's -- one running 24/7/365 for about five years before the motherboard crapped out this summer. And no failures. Except one.
Couple years ago, I explained to my sis-in-law that the hard disks had been brand-new, but just with the IDE interface, and that she had a RAID controller.
Of course, whenever she booted up, she'd see the BIOS initialization of the controller card, and didn't pay attention to it.
Within four days of my informing her -- making her "aware" of the RAID configuration, the hardware, etc. -- she calls to say her system failed. I went over to the house and examined it -- the RAID0 was "broken."
I really do not -- to this day -- believe that the drive just "chose" to fail coincidentally four days after the conversation took place . . . .