New year upgrade

since we have a few techies that are well above the knowledge i have, would like to pick your brains.

after xmas and the new year, it is normally the time i look to upgrade my PC, this time around im looking at replacing my old raptor 10k, its been a fun filled couple years with the old girl but high capacity drives are starting to outperform it, plus theres the new SSD drives that have come out this year.

looking to have a budget of around £300 (~$450-500) but i have no clue as to what is good these days for HD's

(oh as a side note, i'll have a samsung f3 1tb as a storage drive for music/films etc, so its only needed for the win7 OS and about 30gbs games)

I would go with a SSD and load my OS on to it. Also, I would install the games I recently play on it for faster read/write access.

With your OS and the hot game of the month loaded on your new SSD, you should be head shotting a-holes in a reputable fashion.

I haven't personally tested a SSD in a raid, so maybe Rocket can give more details on that.

SSD's in RAID generally offer a larger boost in performance than two HDD's in RAID (in terms of percentage)

But if you go SSD RAID you want to use a RAID on a stick solution like the OCZ Revo Drives, because with RAID you loose the abilities of TRIM.
And most SSD's do not offer garbage collection while in RAID (the Revo Drive does.)

If your SSD does not have garbage collection, then the more you end up using, the slower it grows over time and you'll run into NAND (memory cell) failure faster.


What is your current system? Specs may make the biggest determination on what to upgrade.

specs:

i5 750, stock 2.6
4gb ddr3 9,9,9,24
asus p7p55d mainboard
raptor 10k

will be getting a 1tb f3 for xmas - acting as a standalone storage drive

Your best upgrade right now would be to invest in a 64GB SSD.
Something like a Corsair F60/F64
OCZ Vertex 2
G.Skill Falcon
Or anything based on the Sand-Force controller would be a good idea.

You didn't list a graphics card though?

oh missed that one ATI 1gb 4890 on 10.9 cat

so sandforce is the way to go for the controllers?

Yeah, it offers your best Price to Performance ratio.
For reviews on SSD's I can only recommend reading Anandtech.