building your own pc

[Ant1981]

I'd rather have one SSD over a RAID 0 configuration.  If it's a modest budget then no point going for an i7, they're poor value for money compared to the i5-2500k.

SSD reliability isn't very good at the money. Poor value for money too with sizes being so small. With that in mind I'd rather two fast RAID 0 drives.

[bobbarley]

I'd rather have one SSD over a RAID 0 configuration.  If it's a modest budget then no point going for an i7, they're poor value for money compared to the i5-2500k.

SSD reliability isn't very good at the money. Poor value for money too with sizes being so small. With that in mind I'd rather two fast RAID 0 drives.

Until one of them breaks.  100% of my RAID configs in the past have failed due to one of the drives dying.  Use a 60GB SSD now, only cost £60 so I consider it good value for money considering the speed it provides.

[Ant1981]

I'd rather have one SSD over a RAID 0 configuration.  If it's a modest budget then no point going for an i7, they're poor value for money compared to the i5-2500k.

SSD reliability isn't very good at the money. Poor value for money too with sizes being so small. With that in mind I'd rather two fast RAID 0 drives.

Until one of them breaks.  100% of my RAID configs in the past have failed due to one of the drives dying.  Use a 60GB SSD now, only cost £60 so I consider it good value for money considering the speed it provides.

It's been a hell of a long time since I've seen HD failire.

Two fast drives in RAID 0 are even better value for money as I can have speed across an entire 2TB, rather than 60gb which is very poor storage these days.

[Ridg]

I'd rather have one SSD over a RAID 0 configuration.  If it's a modest budget then no point going for an i7, they're poor value for money compared to the i5-2500k.

SSD reliability isn't very good at the money. Poor value for money too with sizes being so small. With that in mind I'd rather two fast RAID 0 drives.

Until one of them breaks.  100% of my RAID configs in the past have failed due to one of the drives dying.  Use a 60GB SSD now, only cost £60 so I consider it good value for money considering the speed it provides.

It's been a hell of a long time since I've seen HD failire.

Two fast drives in RAID 0 are even better value for money as I can have speed across an entire 2TB, rather than 60gb which is very poor storage these days.

personally I wouldn't store anything important on either; I have my OS / Apps (and selected games) on a SSD and my remaining steam games + other games on a RAID 0, my SSD gets backup up everynight and my photos and music are stored on a RAID 1 array.

At the moment magnetic drives are dirt cheap so RAID 0 and RAID 1 are very accessible options, granted you can get close to SSD transfer speeds for a similar cost, but the random access times is rubbish, this is where you notice the main benefit of the SSD

If you've got the cash get an SSD for windows / applications (you'll need around 60GB for Win7 and apps), if you don't then get a faster drive like the blue of caviar black, the green's are great drives but should only really be used as a storage drive.

[AlexMozza]

I would use SSD eg64 gb for the OS, then have RAID 0 for everything else

[justalex81]

personally i have 6 drives as follows. that way if you're downloading whilst listening to music whilst photoshopping for example, if it was 1 drive then it would have to be in 3 places at once to access data and it will die quicker.

1tb for movies
1tb for pictures/documents
500gb for music. soon to be 2tb as i transfer all my music to lossless.
500gb for downloads

oh and 2 ocz agility 3 60gb ssd's in raid as a boot drive for os and apps 

[Ant1981]

At the moment magnetic drives are dirt cheap so RAID 0 and RAID 1 are very accessible options, granted you can get close to SSD transfer speeds for a similar cost, but the random access times is rubbish, this is where you notice the main benefit of the SSD

The random access times aren't rubbish at all. Twice the speed than standard, half the speed of SSD.

OS doesn't take long at all to run, so it's not worth running that on SSD. The only things that would benefit properly would be intensive read and write programs that suffer frame rate issues, such as the people who run flight simulators and the like, graphics programs that demand from everywhere, but even they can be greater than 60gb.

[bobbarley]

It's well worth putting the OS onto an SSD, most important thing to put onto it.  It's the piece of software that you use the most.  Plus to be honest, I absolutely hate waiting for Windows to boot, so the quicker the better!  I love being able to click on what I want and it opens instantly without having to wait for things to load.

Absolutely no way I'd go back from using an SSD as my primary drive now.

[Ant1981]

It's well worth putting the OS onto an SSD, most important thing to put onto it.  It's the piece of software that you use the most.  Plus to be honest, I absolutely hate waiting for Windows to boot, so the quicker the better!  I love being able to click on what I want and it opens instantly without having to wait for things to load.

Absolutely no way I'd go back from using an SSD as my primary drive now.

Hate waiting for windows to load? What have you done to your windows? Takes seconds to load.

[bobbarley]

You've got to lol, the OP only wants advice on building his own PC