Best drive setup for a quad core computer?

[GrievousAngel]

Hello all,

i have a AMD 3.2 GHz Quad core system with a High Point Hardware RAID subsystem. I want my drive access to be faster! I have a 0+1 (3 x SAS) boot drive + W764b + Programs setup and RAID5 for DATA as below.

I put W7 64b boot + programs on the C: boot drive (RAID0+1)
then put the programs data folders/files on RAID5 (D)
my backups, etc are on my E (single HD)
all 3 subsystems above are on my High Point Hardware RAID PCIe card
is this an OK setup or . . . . ? it does not seem very fast to me but maybe I expect too much!

Would it be worth it to get SSD in place of the 0+1RAID?

How would I best utilize a SSD boot drive with my High Point Hardware RAID PCIe 64 card?

Where can my computer speed be improved? i have a ASUS M4A79T Deluxe + AMD 955 3.2GHz X4 + 2x$GB of memory and the drive system described above. W7 performance test say that my drive system is the slowest part of my computer.

I do minor database appz, some video and music editing, internet stuff with downloading.

What SSD wojld be a excellent choice for W7 + prgrams only boot drive?

thanks,
billy

 

[sminlal]

If you're looking for faster boot and program start up times, then an SSD will give you a big performance boost. Those tasks are heavily dependent on the access time of your storage subsystem, and SSD has access times that are about 100X faster than a hard drive. Note that RAID does not improve access times much, it's benefit is mainly in higher transfer rates (if the stars align).

An SSD won't help you all that much over a RAID setup for reading and writing large files, though. So when you're editing video files you won't see that much difference in the times to load or save them - the biggest speedup would be in the time to start the video editing program itself.

The Intel X25M drives have a long track record and are well regarded as solid, good performers, and the X25V drives are just as solid but smaller and somewhat slower. OCZ Vertex 2 drives don't have as long a track record as the Intel drives, but have similar or better performance numbers.