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I just got done building 3 new comps for work and used SSD's in em. While they definitely make the system more responsive, it only helps during load times. I'm using 32gb drives and could have gotten away with 16gb - that's pleanty to install windows and a few programs. So I have to ask, why would you need/want a 256gb+ SSD? Any music/video can only stream as fast as the playback, video processing is going to be limited by your CPU... what kind of bulk data do you need that kind of instant access to for that price?

As for the PCI-E card, check your bios for boot options to see if something like "PCI Device" is listed. Any new mobo should handle it just fine. The RAID controller should report that it's just a drive.

As for your research, I hope you checked forums. The reported speeds are usually burst speeds (doing transfers from the SSD's onboard cache) and I know the last generation OCZ drives had major stuttering issues when dealing with lots of small reads (which is what your doing during program/windows loading). Basically, the specced speeds are extremely situational and you'll never hit any of them in real world tests.

I bought Samsung drives mostly because they've been making SSD's for awhile now, they make their own memory and controller chips, and they've been selling them to big businesses for awhile now. Their rated speeds aren't the greatest, but from what I've read, they just work.



Listen to everything Burnin said and buy smaller SSD's and raid them together. It will be cheaper and faster. If you are gaming then you should just have an SSD raid with all your OS\games\apps and a regular SATA drive for storage. 256gb of SSD seems overkill unless you are into some big projects. Theres also a lot of snake oil with speeds on first generation SSD's. Make sure you do your research.