I bought 2 Agility 3 120 SSD's for new build-RAID0 or run them independently??

[Jocko 2011]

Got a touch of Black Friday fever and ended up buying 2 OCZ Agility 3 120 gb SSDs with the intent of doing a RAID0 setup, but now am getting cold feet after reading a lot of negative info/opinions about it. I am not a big gamer, but want the fastest boot time and best transcoding performance I can get. Other components in my new build are
Gigabyte GA-Z68X- UD3H-B3 mobo
2500k cpu
8 gigs Corsair XMS ram

It seems like the raid0 setup will definitely provide the best boot times and fastest app loads, but I have become a little nervous about reliability and advisability of doing this. So am I better off

A- proceeding as planned with RAID0?
B- use 1 SSD as the os and applications drive, and the other as storage?
C- use 1 SSD as the os/app drive, return the second and get 500gb WD Caviar Black HDD for storage?
D- another scenario I haven't considered yet?

Thanks in advance for weighing in- I appreciate all the advice/opinions I can get!!

 

[Janus67]

Putting them in RAID0 will likely actually increase your boot time because of the need to load the RAID controller. It will give you increased Read/Write performance, but Access Time will stay about the same (which is why boot times will be the same/slightly slower)

I don't see much reason to use a second SSD as storage, just seems wasteful for the amount of space that you would get. If you have another device (laptop/etc) you could always put the second in there to get nice performance out of it as well. I would think transcoding performance would increase, although you may want to look into if a 2600k would increase that performance over a 2500k because of the support for additional threads.

 

[Jocko 2011]

Thanks for the advice, Janus! I returned one of the SSD drives yesterday, and got a 500 GB WD Caviar Black to use as my data/storage drive, saving $70 and gaining almost 400 gigs of space in the process!

What with all the issues reported with the Sandforce controller, and with the likelihood that I will have to flash the firmware before even installing Windows (which will require me to connect to an already operating computer) the thought of potentially flashing TWO drives and then setting up RAID (and losing TRIM support as well) made me re-think my priorities. I realized that moving to a single SATA 3 SSD from my current 5400 spinner alone will make me very happy in terms of boot-time reduction, and the dual OS/data drive solution will actually force me to do better housecleaning on a regular basis, in order to maintain that speed.

Since I already had the $70 I just saved earmarked for this build, I may use that for a videocard(or 8 gigs more of RAM). I had been planning to just use the on-die Intel 3000 graphics engine since I am not much of a gamer, but it seems like there are a lot of pretty great videocards available in that price range. Time to start researching......