To migrate to SSD from HDD RAID 1 or not

[amillion]

Researching a possible upgrade to a single 240GB SSD for op sys, all the stuff I bought in the Steam Summer Sale (!!), other nuts, hoping for a performance boost over existing RAID 1 HDD. The array will then end up being relegated to a general dumping ground for apps I loath as much as Word and Excel and pictures of a dubious nature.

Reading other threads, have seen Diskmark is a good benchmark tool to run to get stats about current throughput of the RAID array.

What other tools are there I could use to "predict" performance in the "real world" after a change to SSD?

I'm tempted to buy the Corsair GT 240 as promised a "good deal" by a Tottenham Court Road shop. Or I can get myself the Samsung 830, which seems a goodi dea because of the apparent gains over Sandforce when the data isn't compressible.

However, I've seen that gaming performance doesn't really improve that much.

My CPU is old (Q6600 OC to 3Ghz) and my mobo is old (SATA-II, USB 2, bla bla) and am sure my graphics card (OC GTX580) is bottlenecked.

Could I be spending £200 just to get a barely noticable 10-20% increase in system performance?

Is my decision to move to an SSD primarily for gaming utter nonsense?

Should I save my cash and wait for Haswell on S2011 (1) (2) and be done with it?

And no I'm NOT migrating to Windows H8. So don't even go there. !

 

[amillion]

I ran Crystal Disk Mark, showing that I am getting Sequential Read speeds of around 50MB/s, and writes at around 140MB/s. I was expecting much higher read speeds, always thinking that a RAID 1 would have meant much better read times, randoms at least. Apparently not. THat answers my first question - RAID 1 on an ICH7 is no where near a competitor to SSD's likely speeds.

Sites testing the GT show about 300/400 MB/s (1) and I would therefore expect the corsair, let alone the 830, to decrease the disk bottleneck by 70-80%. From the earlier article, I'm expecting a big gaming performance increase on load, but the rest won't really benefit.

Then I used Treesize to see what is creeping over 240GB on my system drive.

Oh.

Steam.

In other words, I could barely get games on to that SSD. or be forced to do stupid things like copying steam games back and forth between the HDD and SSD whenever I wanted to play one rather than the other, bla bla bla.

Total shame.

But my question is answered: yes, performance boost; no, not enough space.