You're the one making assumptions about my rig(note that my MB doesn't support RAID), I've only gave my opinion about my experience with an SSD. I buy hardware on value for money and for me, this SSD is a good investment and I'll be buying another 60GB SSD soon.

If I wanted to brag about my rig I'd go somewhere else like a proper PC hardware forum but I don't so just because I've got an SSD, you think I'm bragging.

RAID 0 drives are only relatively faster in large sequential reads/writes. In the majority of cases, I believe a RAID 0 will only improve performance about 20% on average over a single drive. RAID 0 also roughly doubles the likelihood of array failure and data loss, which may or may not be a big issue depending on the use. More to the point, a RAID 0 does not really improve random IO speeds, which is the main metric impacting system responsiveness and where SSDs reign supreme (often by an order of magnitude).

A RAID 0 will help reduce the storage bottleneck, and is certainly cheaper and bigger than an SSD, but it will never be on par with one performance-wise. You get what you pay for; SSDs are expensive for a reason.

This. What makes SSD's great as OS drives is the extremely low latency. You get little to no latency benefits from RAID-0. The playing field looks more level when you're talking about transfering large files, but when you're talking about accessing a lot of different, smaller files very quickly an SSD pulls ahead significantly.

It's a very noticeable difference. Whether or not it's worth the money is pretty subjective. I got mine for about $1 USD / gigabyte, which I thought was worth the increase in responsiveness I experienced.

The point is its not an either/or proposition when it comes to SSDs and HDDs, you can have *BOTH* simultaneously. As much as heterogenous computing is gaining popularity, heterogenous storage has always been the best approach as that's the whole idea behind RAM to begin with. You have different storage mediums with different speeds based on price, performance and need. After you have so many TB of storage, how much more do you need? Of those mountains of TB, how much of that do you actually want/need more performance? I think most anyone can profile their apps down to two categories 1) apps/games/data that benefit from more performance and 2) data/storage/junk that doesn't benefit at all from increased performance outside of infrequent, large transfers between disks.

SSDs are no different, you have to weigh the pros and cons of capacity and speed against the size and price benefits of HDDs. In that sense, SSDs fall in a more favorable light than they ever have relative to HDDs due to the floods in Thailand and the massive drops in SSD pricing over the last 6 months. As Softnerd stated, you can buy fast, reliable SSDs for $1/GB or less. I see deals on these daily, with Intels 320s going for even less than that AR, and a few OCZ Vertex/Agility 3s going for less than $1/GB the last few days at Newegg.

In any case, my best advice is to purchase a single $80-$100GB SSD with 80-100GB of capacity and update your frame of reference before commenting on this topic further. To anyone who has been into desktop computing for more than a minute, this is not a big deal given we paid this much for 80 MBs 20 years ago and 80 GB 10 years ago. I did the Raptor RAID, I'm doing the multi-drive RAID0 now, and I can tell you hands down, the SSD destroys them in every measurable and perceivable way except for sequential read/write (SATA6G SSDs will win though). For less than $100, its EASILY the biggest single upgrade you can make for your PC provided you've taken care of the basics (CPU, GPU, RAM).

As for the comments about the sig lol: it cuts down on questions/concerns about settings, problems, operating temps, whatever. Its especially useful when I say something like "my game runs great with the HD texture pack, silky smooth 60+ FPS always" and someone wants to know exactly what component in their own system may be preventing from achieving similar.

Having had 6 WD Caviar Black 64mb cache 640gb SATA III drives in raid 0. These specific drives are even able to outperform the 10k raptor drives in specific senario.. if not match them. I know exactly and precisely what the fastest and most efficient upgrades are for modern computers.. and SSD will continue to be in many places that count, dozen if not hundreds to even thousands of times faster. Actually today, our SATA III standards combined with current Hardrive controllers, were ahead of the hardrives requiring few and far between updates. Since the introduction of SSDs, the currently available controllers are nearly entirely saturated, resulting in SSDs being limited to how fast they could be going. SATA III only came out a short time ago and at launch, OCZ had a drive that basically hit it's maximum right off the bat.

A single WD Caviar Black 640gb 64mb cache SATA III drive can at times average around the 125-150MB/s sustain read speed with slightly lower writes. Meaning 6 of them should theoretically produce a sustained 900MB/s maximum read with slightly lower write in raid 0. While some people will scoff at the thought of just 2 drives in raid 0 because that essentially doubles your chances of total data loss due to doubling the drives, the chances of this occurring are extremely slim, more so even though with 6 drives i'm multiplied the chances of failure by that number, the chances are still exceptionally low. Some people are overly paranoid, at which point raid 5 would be a better choice if you are.

Still it's not about Total Sustained read/writes... i actually HATE how many people review hardrives and only test this functionality like it really matter, it's rare that in normal everyday use that you'd EVER be using your hardrives like this. So even when a 900MB/s read with slightly lower writes are manageable vs the current 550MB/s read / writes of SSDs, the SDD will continue to be like i said, several dozen/hundred/thousands of times faster in other more important tasks.

I/Os and micro loads/writes as mentioned before in this thread.

Additionally the Largest Bottleneck in any modern computer and has been this way for years, has always been the hardrive, even SSDs are still slower than the rest of the components usually, resulting in the computer sitting and waiting around for the data.

With Ram in some machines breaking 20GB/s, that poor 0.125GB/s hardrive is a long ways from matching that. The most recent 2011 socket systems are averaging around 35-45GB/s for ram.... so that makes it that much more evidence.

Today, the single most noticeable improvement to a computer is i would say an SSD.... no smaller than 120gb, and i would probably suggest nothing larger than 240gb unless your willing to spend a pile of money.

Additionally, Depending on your tasks, A good majority of the computer users around the world rarely exceed 100gb total comsumed space, 200gb at the most. Gamers will exceed this capacity but rare. And if your heavily torrenting or downloading music and video, well you fall into another class of user which obviously needs capacity, but loading/watching/listening to these types of files is not at all heavily hardrive limited. So picking up a 2tb Hardrive as a secondary drive is an intelligent move.

Personally after cleaning up windows 7's idiotic Hibernation and Page file settings, the initial install of windows 7 can be brought from it's nearly 50gb installation size down to about 10gb without effecting anything else significantly. My hibernation file example was 16gb in size, followed by my Swap file being set to 24gb (with 16gb of ram) or 48gb of ram (if using 32gb of ram)... that's 40gb of totally useless and unnecessarily wasted hardrive space. This is a very CRITICAL amount of space when using a 120gb or 240gb hardrive or less.

Again as mentioned prior in this thread, Many games today load on the go, some MMOs or games are heavily streamed based. Some local single player games are dynamic as well today which really are noticeable in their play through between a ssd or hardrive.

On my one computer with a single 120gb, I've set a primary partition of 35gb for windows and all my programs..
then i made the remainder of the drive specifically for installing steam games and other games, which is approximately 80gb in size, i also fraps to this drive, but i can only get a few minutes due to 30 seconds of fraps = 4gb @ 24fps...

You really have a hate for SSDs or anyone that appears to know that they are a huge improvement over the standard drives.

4x/5x the price? Are we talking capacity of actual price of the drives.

Last i checked i could pick up a 120gb OCZ Agility 3 or vertex 3 for about twice/thrice the price of a very good Hardrive.

I also haven't seen a SSD sold without a 2.5-3.5 adapter/converter so that you can mount the ssd in a typical case.

The more of your posts i read about how much you dispise any person from so much as mentioning that a SSD is a damn good choice to make for a computer, the more it sounds like your trying to justify why your sticking to your higher capacity hardrives and trying to avoid SSDs. Did you have major BSODs with your ssd? Did it crash and burn, was your computer unable to make any significant use of it? Are you stuck on SATA I or perhaps a poor Sata II controller resulting in your ssd being unable to perform at even half of it's theoretical peak performance.

I don't know, you sound completely silly, specially if anyone decided to go looking at any of the current MODERN SSD benchmarks and tests made by any reliable and level headed reviewer/tester.

orders of magnitude

I'm sorry, but unless I've missed some big reviews of SSDs, no SSD comes close to maxing out SATA III. There top-of-the-line SSDs max out SATA II (with arguably being bottlenecked unless on SATA III), but nothing comes close to topping SATA III. If there is one, please point me to the review of it.

NOTE: I'm not disagreeing with you that SSDs are better than RAID 0 (for numerous reasons that have all already been mentioned), I just don't believe any drive has maxed out SATA III, as I've not seen any review of one that does.