I have always been told that raid 0 is fast, but extremely unreliable and prone to failure. I really want to build a machine with raid 0, but im really scared about the chance of failure. the few people ive talked to has said the chance is quite high. is that true?
Well, the first part is right ... they are quite fast!
And, while statistically they are more prone to failure, drive failures don't happen often to any single user. Whether a single drive or a pair of RAID drives,
any failure can and must be mitigated by a good backup strategy.
Since you are keeping a backup (just do it) ... I wouldn't worry about a RAID-0 failure.
I have been running RAID-0 arrays for years with both disks and SSDs with excellent results and no failures. I do keep an automatic backup to be prepared.