It's somewhat unfair to judge RAID 0 performance like this. Using these sorts of benchmarks to determine RAID 0 performance is like sticking a Radeon X800 XT in your computer and rebooting Windows XP over and over again, claiming it's a waste because it doesn't speed up boot times.
(If you really don't know, a Radeon X800 XT is a recent ATI video card released at $500 that is approx twice as fast as any previous generation video card... I really don't know why I'm explaining this, but I personally live amongst non-computer people Sorry, won't do it again)
Quite honestly, RAID 0 does provide some pretty good performance gains, but will not show in any of the tests provided:
1. for you gamers out there (seeing that gamers are the ones who spend lots of $$ on computer equipment) the reason why load times of some games do not see significant benefit from RAID 0 is because:
i. your video card has 128-256 MB of ram and thus even a lousy laptop hard drive could fill that at 20 MB/s in under 10 seconds
ii. other things that are loaded with a level just go into your system ram, which is likewise most likely only 512-1024 MB (which programmers try to optimize usage of anyway by not loading all the textures in the level all at the beginning anyway)
iii. high resolution textures usually require some degree of decompression upon "loading" a level which involves more cpu/graphics card usage than hard drive bandwidth
2. In response to all those business benchmarks using excel/word, tiny i/o processes are not really capped by hard drive bandwidth (as opposed to a few large i/o processes). They should have used some benchmarks involving photoshop or adobe premiere.
3. the main benefit of RAID 0 is load time... this can be seen in a speedier boot-up time (assuming you have your RAID 0 set up right). Unfortunately it's less obvious in program applications since the extra speed is only seen the first time you load the program (since after that the files are still cached in RAM).
My conclusion is that Anandtech has done the best they could with the existing benchmarking programs they had, but their conclusion is extremely biased against RAID 0.
Many (non-gaming) people today view a computer's speed as how fast it can start a program. There is nothing more satisfying than clicking on a button and seeing that startup screen snap up like it was waiting for you. Usually that only happens the second time you start the program (as the files are already in RAM) but RAID 0 brings us one step closer to having that all the time.
It's really late now, and I think I'm losing the point that I wanted to make when I started typing
My final conclusion? Every time you hear that "clickety clack" sound from your computer, you could be doing whatever you're doing faster if you had RAID 0. Anytime you don't hear it, RAID 0 will not help you worth a darn because your hard drives aren't even spinning. Period.