raid to ssd for gaming?

[Dice]

so at the moment i have a 60Gb ocz vertex 2E as a system drive and 2 1TB samsung F3 in raid 0 for games. as HDD's are fetching such a high price at the moment (i estimate £50 each on ebay) i was considering flogging both my f3s and buying one of these
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Solid+State+Drives/Mushkin+Chronos+180GB+2.5%22+SATA-III+Solid+State+Hard+Drive+?productId=47716
using it as a games drive, i have an unused 500gb cavilear black which i'll transfer games i'm not currently playing onto.
At the moment im mostly playing battlefield 3 and Skyrim but picked up batman off green man yesterday.
So i have a few questions:
are the problems with the sandforce drives sorted?
any thoughts on the reliability of the drive i linked? From what i have read intel or crucial seem to be the most reliable at the moment....
also aside from load times will i see a benifit? i know my FPS won't improve but how about popin and texture loading?
i know its not really nessasary but i kinda got the itch to buy something and daaaammm the 7970s are £xp£n$ive!!
peace out peeps!

 

[Bo$$]

Keep raid, SSD will be slightly quicker but all that extra space on the HDD is better.
Raid 0 is fast enough for games, if you have a dedicated OS drive as you do, there probabily no benefit, i dont see any pop in on my system, generally that is a CPU bound thing.

What are the rest of your specs??
edit: pop some cash on a graphics card it will be much much better than a silly SSD. get a 6970 or wait for the 7XXX series

 

[Dice]

I dont think my budget will stretch to a 7970 and im not sure that going to a 6970 will be worth it. My 5870 is @1gh on water and is still pretty powerfull, i may have i think when the 7950 is released... But my point is that ive seen 2 f3 go for £60 on ebay in the last couple of days making the upgrade to a 180gb Ssd ~ £45 i think thats plenty big enough for some games and i can just copy any im not playing onto the 500gb drive so i wont need to download them again..
My main worry is the issues that the sata3 sandforce drives have been experiancing...

 

[Steevo]

A SSD with the OS and pagefile on it plus any other stuff will blow any mechanical RAID out of the water.

 

[Bo$$]

A SSD with the OS and pagefile on it plus any other stuff will blow any mechanical RAID out of the water.

he ALREADY has SSD for OS, he wants a new one for games.


Be sure you wont run out of space otherwise if you are itching to do it then do it!
there are still issues with some of the SATA 3 controllers, just read up about the individual drive.

this is pretty much your question: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/275651-14-crucial-mushkin-chronos-deluxe

 

[Frizz]

Between your raid setup and SSD the difference in gaming that you will notice will be very minimal, sure you might load a couple of seconds faster than everyone else but once you're in game your CPU and GPU will be the one doing all the work unless of course your hdd's are terrible which I doubt. Also your games will start up faster by a few seconds but again that's barely worth spending more than $100 just to get a decent 60GB for your games. If I were you I'd wait for the HDD prices to go down to do a Raid0 config with new 2x 1TB WD Blacks or 2x Velociraptors as they will offer more space for your games and consistent performance without the degradation.

 

[Dice]

Yeah but i think it'll only cost me £45 ($70) to get a 180gb sata 3 ssd. think i may go to the pub and have a think about it.... (always helps me spend money i dont need to!!!)

 

[Frizz]

Yeah but i think it'll only cost me £45 ($70) to get a 180gb sata 3 ssd. think i may go to the pub and have a think about it.... (always helps me spend money i dont need to!!!)

Ahh if that's the case I'd say go for it since the mechanical HDD prices at the moment are very inflated atm.