New system / SSD advice

A good OCZ or Intel SSD will definitely speed up your system, But you should be prepared to reinstall Windows7 (because of all the automatic settings that the Win7 installer makes) - else you can clone but then you have to do a lot of finagling yourself.
For the OS, a 60GB disk is ample - even a 30GB SSD may do because Win7 will hardly ever be bigger than 20GBs (unbless you have a lot of games in the program library). The data should then go on your Raid. Expect the WEI for the disk to go to 7.3 or better - but that does not mean much in my book.

While performance would increase with the black over the blue....your score will stay 5.9. The only way to really drive that up is with an SSD drive...which will make a big difference. Application starts are almost instant and there is no noise. I use an SSD for my OS and a Caviar black for storage in my box.

Go for the SSD I use an OCZ Vertex 128 GB Drive the difference is like comparing driving a Formula 1 racing car to a Hearse. Well not quite that bad.

I use a dual boot system on the SSD I have Win 7 and on my Seagate 1TB I have XP, the is an amazing difference in speed. I have been using XP all day as my scanner will only work on a 32 bit system and while it is quite fast I was glad to get back to Win 7 and the SSD. In my opinion if you can afford it go for the SSD bigger the better :)


Steve

As I posted elsewhere, SSD cost per GB storage is roughly 10 times that of SATA HDDs ($0.24 v. $2.61). The question I ask myself, is the cost/benefit ratio pragmatic or otherwise demonstrable? For me, it is not.

WHS suggested, below, that you might expect a WEI of 7.3 or better but that did not mean that much to him. I could not agree more.

Pparks1 extolled the increase in launch time and quiet operation. I would not appreciate the difference in an app launching in 3 seconds v. a half a second. But that's just me. And quiet: I never hear my SATA HDD activity due to ambient room noise, the radio, case fans, or my stomach growling.

Steve-Pressman contrasts the difference in boot times between XP and Win7. Not really fair to do since, by design, Win7 is going to boot and shut down faster than XP regardless. (I, too, dual boot XP/Win7)

My suggestion would be to visit the various sites (Google points to many) that benchmark and compare SSDs and SATA HDDs and then decide if the cost/benefit ratio to you is worthwhile.

Monk

i also am thinking about this, when i start a program like photoshop it takes about 5 seconds, don't seem alot but seeing i have quad core and 4 gig ram, i want it to be instant because my cpu can do this, open it up again and it's instant, because it's been cached. the hdd is trying to find the data by spinning it on the drive. I also notice that peoples welcome screens just a blur.

So the reason why i will be upgrading, it's because i think my HDD is bottlenecking my pc, it could be so much faster, i know what it can do with a SSD.

But it's fast comapred to some HDD users out there, so i can't imagine what it would be like with an SSD.

HMonk said:

Pparks1 extolled the increase in launch time and quiet operation. I would not appreciate the difference in an app launching in 3 seconds v. a half a second. But that's just me. And quiet: I never hear my SATA HDD activity due to ambient room noise, the radio, case fans, or my stomach growling.

Where I really feel the difference is when launching a game. Games that used to take 15-20 seconds to get into the main menu are now there in about 3-5.

No doubt, they are expensive...but at least it's a noticeable improvement across the board. While I wouldn't say that I couldn't use a computer without an SSD...I also don't regret my purchase in any way.

pparks1 said:

HMonk said:

Pparks1 extolled the increase in launch time and quiet operation. I would not appreciate the difference in an app launching in 3 seconds v. a half a second. But that's just me. And quiet: I never hear my SATA HDD activity due to ambient room noise, the radio, case fans, or my stomach growling.

Where I really feel the difference is when launching a game. Games that used to take 15-20 seconds to get into the main menu are now there in about 3-5.

No doubt, they are expensive...but at least it's a noticeable improvement across the board. While I wouldn't say that I couldn't use a computer without an SSD...I also don't regret my purchase in any way.

Although I have never run an SSD, based on your experiences, I can see where some games might benefit. For me, the launch time for most games is not an issue. However, waiting for DA Origins to launch and load sometimes challenges the limits of my patience.

Monk