SSD's - to RAID or not to RAID?

[Rids]

I'm currently awaiting delivery of a 128 GB Samsung SSD from our hosts here, just realised I have no where to actually sit the thing so I've ordered a caddie for them... and now I'm thinking, do I plump for another one and go for RAID 0?

Lets just say that its tight, but its within my budget to do, but what worries me is the technical aspect of it.

Despite my membership of this site, I'm not the most technically astute of people. I can fit a HDD, lets face it that isnt rocket science, I'm pretty sure I can fit two of them, I'm worried though that if I start delving into this RAID lark I'll melt something.

I suppose the first question, with a standard SSD - is there anything I need to set? Going to be installing Windows 7 on it, and from everything that I have read Windows 7 will do pretty much all the work for me and optimise everything that needs to be optimised!

The second question then, how difficult is it going to be? Is it something that I will be able to get to work in an hour with a bit of tinkering, or am I going to be sitting there pulling what is left of my hair out. Are there heaps of settings / optimisations that I'm going to have to tinker around with till I find the right one?

And is the performance increase in RAID 0 going to be worth it? PC does get a hell of a lot of gaming use, but so far its been able to handle everything that I have thrown at it. However, the decreased boot / loading time thing is really calling to me.

If you need the info - rig is as follows.

i7 920 2.66 @ 3.6ghz
Biostar T-Power x58
6 GB Tri Channel 1866 Mhz DDR3
4870 2048MB ATi beast.

Any advice greatly appreciated, even if a link or two to read while I wait!

Cheers

 

[drunkenmaster]

raid will make very little difference in terms of performance to be honest, load time of games is NOT dependant ONLY on hard drive speed, you've got a lot of unpacking, processing and getting data ready to be done.

Some games load an ok amount faster, some aren't faster loading on an intel ssd than a samsung F1. I've got 2xcrucials raided(2x64 rather than buying a single 128gb). It scales fine, its nice and fast, benchmarks tell me its almost twice as fast and the important 4kb random read/writes are all but doubled, but I can't feel that performance difference in almost anything. I've got my most used games on the SSD and install less used things on a mechanical hdd, and with almost all games the loading is very quick. I installed Lotro on both ssd and normal hdd and the load times very fairly similar to be honest.

I think any half decent ssd basically maxes out the performance you need and you'll very VERY rarely see improved performance with a second ssd in raid. Even loading windows you won't see a massive increase.

 

[rjk]

i had two 80gb intels in raid0
i am no going to use a single 160gb intel instead

means i get TRIM and better write performance

there is no noticable difference in day to day use