I absolutely hate SSD's; they are nothing but a cheap-as in money grubbing-attempt at a fast buck by the manufacturers to cash in on something that is obselete before they distribute them. I owned a Corsair 256G and sold it after 2 weeks. I noticed no real world significant gains in anything but boot and app load times-games etc. The 600G Velociraptors in RAID0 provide excellent performance at a reasonable cost and I have been using the Raptors since WD first started selling them back whenever-never had one fail. That said, I really don't care if the system takes an extra couple of seconds to boot up and when running an app/game; it all loads into memory and after that the HHD's are out of the picture, unless paging in which case nothing short of more memory will help anyways.
Like USB 3 and SATA III, SSD's cause nothing but disappointment in compatability and performance on anything. My USB 2 runs better most times than 3 and SATA III does nothing for me really over SATA II-all marketing hype. The third party SATA III and USB 3 chips the mobo manufacturers are polluting they're products with are, for all intensive purposes-useless; they just aren't compatable and do not work. Benchmarks are not my thing-each to his/her own; I look at how my system works doing the things I like to do. For example, I've run all my games at the highest settings possible using a single 7970 and have yet to falter. You visit x and y sites displaying a bunch of benchmarks showing AMD this, NVIDIA that-well they're full of it and I can prove it in real game play.
All my Office 2010 apps load nicely, work well with no glitching and I get no BSOD.
I agree with one of the moderators when he said SAS is the way to go and that will be my direction in the near future. Footnote, it looks like Hitachi-his drive of choice-has been purchased by WD. Those 64MB cache SAS drives are getting rare it would seem with few etailers stocking/selling them-450G being the largest Hitachi SAS I could find available.
Anyways, this is just my opinion and I'm sure the majority will disagree, but, then, that is what it is all about-isn't it!?
🙂 Windows 7 Ultimate x64
ASUS Rampage IV EXTREME/BF3 motherboard
Intel Core i7 3960X CPU @ 3.3G (stock) (BIOS 1404 modified Intel ROM 3.1.0.2101)
Zalman CNPS9900MAX-B Headsink
32G (8*4) Corsair CMT16GX3M4X2133C9 Dominator GT 16GB Quad Channel memory at 2133Mz (xmp profile)
Seasonic ATX 1000W 80PLUS Platinum Power Supply
LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray writer
2*Western Digital Velociraptor 500GB (64mb cache) in RAID0 on the x79 at SATA 3
2*Western Digital Velociraptor 1000GB (64mb cache) (1Tb) in AHCI on the x79 at SATA 2
2*XFX FX-797A-TNBC Radeon HD7970 OC Black Edition video cards in crossfireX at GEN 3
Auzentech X-Fi Hometheater HD Audio Card at GEN 2
Silverstone Temjin TJ10B-W NVIDIA Edition Case
TJ10 USB 3 upgrade kit
1*Noctua NF-S12B FLX 120mm, 4*Noctua NF-P12 120mm Chassis Fans
Asus PA246Q, 24.1" Widescreen P-IPS Monitor
Canon MP560 series Printer
Logitech G9x Laser Mouse
SteelSeries 6G V2 Mechanical Keyboard
APC Smart-UPS SMT2200
"If you say you can't, then, you probably can't"