Well I can tell you this .... we conducted two experiments:
1. Desktop system ... 5 users over 6 weeks; each system had (2) 256 GB Samsung Pros (2) Seagate 2 TB 7200 rpm SSHDs and (1) 7200 rpm HD. Users were told that we had installed new AV / system monitoring software and asked them to report any periodic performance issues on booting, application or gaming usage. The system had multiple OS installs, set up such that system could be booted of any of the drive types and were changed w/o anyone's knowledge daily via boot menu. Over the 6 weeks, one user reported in one instance where boot time "seemed slower".
2. Twin laptops ... same 5 users, two lappies, one equipped with SSD and HD, one equipped with SSHD. No reported differences
This does not show that all those storage devices are the same speed ... it does show that the user impact is negligible enough that user's are not impacted. These are measured results:
Boot Times:
HD = 21.2 seconds
SSHD = 16.5 seconds
SSD = 15.6 seconds
AutoCAD load large file times were identical which was puzzling
Game load times with MMO were also identical which was attributed to server handshaking being the bottleneck
3. The desktop box was iniially set up, prior to above test as RAID 0 on SSDs and RAID 1 on SSHDs ... after 3 months, arrays were broken.. interestengly when we called Samsung they advised that RAID was not supported nor recommended.
4. We have tested RAID about every three years over the last dozen or so years ... looking for answers as to why we saw no gain in either apps that we use or gaming (RAID does have a place in animation, rendering, video editing) and collexted the following about 10 years ago ... nothing's changed:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0
RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.
RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2]
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
"We were hoping to see some sort of performance increase in the game loading tests, but the RAID array didn't give us that. While the scores put the RAID-0 array slightly slower than the single drive Raptor II, you should also remember that these scores are timed by hand and thus, we're dealing within normal variations in the "benchmark".
Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds; lower scores, obviously, being better. In Unreal Tournament, we're left with exactly no performance improvement, thanks to RAID-0
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.
Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth."
http://www.techwarelabs.com/articles/hardware/raid-and-gaming/index_6.shtml
".....we did not see an increase in FPS through its use. Load times for levels and games was significantly reduced utilizing the Raid controller and array. As we stated we do not expect that the majority of gamers are willing to purchase greater than 4 drives and a controller for this kind of setup. While onboard Raid is an option available to many users you should be aware that using onboard Raid will mean the consumption of CPU time for this task and thus a reduction in performance that may actually lead to worse FPS. An add-on controller will always be the best option until they integrate discreet Raid controllers with their own memory into consumer level motherboards."
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1001325
"However, many have tried to justify/overlook those shortcomings by simply saying "It's faster." Anyone who does this is wrong, wasting their money, and buying into hype. Nothing more."
http://jeff-sue.suite101.com/how-raid-storage-improves-performance-a101975
"The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment."
http://www.scs-myung.com/v2/index. [...] om_content
"What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 "holy grail." This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain.....As stated above, first person shooters rarely benefit from RAID 0.__ Frame rates will almost certainly not improve, as they are determined by your video card and processor above all else. In fact, theoretically your FPS frame rate may decrease, since many low-cost RAID controllers (anything made by Highpoint at the tiem of this writing, and most cards from Promise) implement RAID in software, so the process of splitting and combining data across your drives is done by your CPU, which could better be utilized by your game. That said, the CPU overhead of RAID0 is minimal on high-performance processors."
Even the HD manufacturers limit RAID's advantages to very specific applications and non of them involves gaming:
http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/
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5. BTW, other than for that test box, we have not installed a HD in over 7 years. None of those we installed (gotta be 50+) has failed. I have replaced two older SSDs, well 3 as a warranty replacement also failed, but they were when SSDs were relatively new and didn't have the life span of current drives.
Yes, you can post benchmarks all day long and i will agree that there is a HUGE speed difference in benchmarks.... but what those benchmarks simulate are things that are not performed often every day ... I just don't have the need to move 500 GB of files very day ... yes I have 2 TB of backups, but after the 1st one, the rest only take seconds since they are incremental. When I decide that work day is over and it's now "play time", I start the game load, walk away to gran a bio or a snack and all ready when I sit down again. My son does the same thing and who cares if game loads in 23 versus 21 seconds while he's logging in to discord, putting his headphones on and opening his browser to display game related web pages that he uses for a resource ?
We recommend an SSD paired with an SSHD in every build .... if budget restrictions result in say dropping GFX card down a tier, starting with the SSHD and adding the SSD later is the recommended option. We put a backup OS install on the SSHD anyway. Given your system specs, if you sticking with just 8 GB of RAM, and budget is an issue, I'd:
a) Use the 500 GB SSD for OS and fav games.
b) Use the 128 GB for pagefile , temp files and maybe even a RAM drive
c) Use a 2 TB SSHD Firecuda 7200 rpm
In gaming, the older Seagate SSD was 50% faster than the WD Blacks in gaming, far greater than anything you will see w/ RAID 0 on the desktop in gaming ... THG Hard Drive charts not loading today but here's the link
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/
still got months of saving to go before I can do anything at all, let alone potentially holding until Ice Lake comes around.