Building a new PC - Need Assistance if possible

[SuperTim]

What is the differences between a SSD Hard drive and a SATA 6.0Gb/s Hard drive???
Benefits???
Is it worth the cost?
I've been out of the mix for a while building PC's.  Just wanted to know is it worth it to spend the extra $$$$
My plan was to get 2 500GB SATA drives and RAID 0 them.

This is current idea at the moment

- Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
- CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX850 V2 850W ATX12V v2.31/ EPS12V v2.92 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC High Performance Power Supply
- G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9Q-16GBXL
- MSI P67A-GD65 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
- Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80623I52500K
- 2 Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drives

Total approx. $872 all at NewEgg

I currently have a EVGA 012-P3-1470-AR GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Car I purchased in March from NewEgg but now I see it has been discontinued.
Currently running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit as well

Any comments of info would greatly be appreciated

Thanks in advance

[Schlup]

Hey there stranger!  Good to see you again!

Ok, on to business.  With your build it appears to be fairly highend, which means you pretty much definitely want to go with SSD drives.  At least for your operating system and most used software.  You could probably do a RAID 0 in addition for purely extra storage space.  SSD's could be compare to DVD where the regular hard drives would be VHS tapes.  They are the new generation and everything is going to them.  They are MUCH faster and wouldn't bottleneck your system once built.  I can safely say you would be happy with the purchase of SSD over regular HDD even if you are getting the 6.0Gb/s (which is kinda pointless because the old drives will never be even close to being able to utilize that amount of speed).  New SSD's on the other hand also come in 6.0Gb/s and the ones I've seen are stupid fast.  It will be roughly 5 times faster running a single SSD than your (2) SATA 6.0 regular HDD's.  You'll be able to boot up into windows in probably under 10 seconds (fully loaded) with the SSD to give you a real world comparison.  Let me know if you have any other questions.

[FALLEN]

i have 2 ssd's in 0 raid and its the best upgrade iv ever done. ssd all the way and no moving parts . but know this u have to take care of a ssd there are proper ways to wipe them and u should never run a defrag  on them. most have a build in program that will do what they call garbage collect and its kinda like defraging but not. idk i would read some forums about them before buying and installing. but it is the way to go oh and there small lol

[SuperTim]

Thank you for your input FALLEN and really great to hear from you.
As far as SSD goes, they do cost more as their size goes up..... and you say you're running 2 in Raid 0, 60gb each.......
60GB will fill up pretty fast for me.....    What sizes do you recommend?  Brand recommendation?  Do you install everything on the ssd's or do you just use them for the OS and install everything else on a separate drive?

[SuperTim]

Thanks for your input as well Schlup, I really appreciate it
Recommend 2 SSD's in Raid 0............size??? Just as I asked FALLEN.....60gb not very big.  Do you just use the SSD's for the OS or

[SuperTim]

BTW...great to see both of you.  I've been around.....havent went anywhere.  Still playing COD Black Ops and BF all the time.  I go in TS every now and then, but everyone either playing Tanks or WOW......

[Schlup]

Yeah, RAID 0 SSD's will even make it go faster.  Getting 6.0Gb/s SSD's and putting them in RAID 0 will probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 times faster than Fallen's setup.  You'd be banging on the door of 1Gb/s read/write speeds.  As for size and whatnot, I'd get as big as you can afford.  But remember to have some left over cash for your "storage" regular HDD's.  I'd install the OS and any games or applications that I play ALOT on the SSD, everything else on the "storage" drives.

As far as brand is concerned there are several out now that are very good.  Why don't you have a look and pick out a few different models that you would be interested in and post them, then we can give you feedback as to which one might be best.

[SuperTim]

Cool...I"ll do that...
Always greatful to get input to help me make the decision

[FALLEN]

np man good to see u i have ocz vertex 2's and yes 2 60G = 111G of space it saves some for the raid its self. but i have a 500g back up drive for games. my pc is stupid fast boot speeds and of 450 mb reads and writes its nice and i would say and stick to a brand that it top of the line in ram as well do to the chips on ram and ssd's are almost the same