Show us your SSD performance

sygnus21, you apparently have a laptop since you say that you need at least 120GBs. I generally do not recommend SSDs for laptops because they are still too expensive for storing data. There are some recent laptops with 2 disk bays where it would make sense though.
Generally a 60GB or even a 30 to 40GB SSD is sufficient for the Win7 OS. But then you have to put your data on a spinner.
As for the preparation and maintenance - with Win7, you really do not have to do anything. As long as the BIOS can recognize the SSD, the Win7 installer can deal with it and will make all the required settings. Just make sure you disconnect all other disks that may contain a MBR - else you get into a double boot situation which may give you problems down the road. For booting, change the boot sequence in the BIOS.
If it is a Gen2 SSD, there is no maintenance down the road. The Win7 supported Trim will take care of it. I am not a fan of all those tweaks that float around the net. Just verify that the defrag is turned off (which the Win7 installer usually does), move the user data to a HDD and delete the hibernation file if you do not use hibernation. That's all.

I am not a gamer so I do not know the requirements for gaming. I only know that the games seem to need a large amount of space for the files and that can be expensive to cover with the SSDs. The other day they were presenting a 1TB SSD ( World's First 1 TB 2.5" SSD from PureSilicon Is the Dream Drive ) but it was rather expensive.

Impressive performance (and an impressive system). But what I always ask myself: Does this kind of transfer rate really perform better (for the OS) than e.g. a single SSD with 200MB/sec. Since the system reads only relatively small bits of data, the data transfer rate should not play such a big role (versus the random acces time which I think is the key element).

whs said:

Impressive performance (and an impressive system). But what I always ask myself: Does this kind of transfer rate really perform better (for the OS) than e.g. a single SSD with 200MB/sec. Since the system reads only relatively small bits of data, the data transfer rate should not play such a big role (versus the random acces time which I think is the key element).

I feel the same way that you do WHS. For running an operating system where it's just random I/O and small reads and writes...i don't believe the performance is really much improved. It's the low access time....and random I/O times which improve things. The RAID config I'm sure increased that random I/O by a bit...so there would be some gain there.

If you were copying and moving around large video files...then it would really shine. But at 700+MB/s....it would take less than 10 minutes to fill 3 x 160GB drives in a RAID0.