I'll get straight to the point! My hard drive crashed. I can't repair it with Windows repair even though SMART shows the drives as healthy, when I go to Windows repair I can see the volume once the raid drivers have been added but I can't repair the issue as I get a read error!

All my important data gets saved straight to my network drive so the only data I had on my drive were files I downloaded like drivers, benchmark software, some pictures from fraps and my all important game saves!

I guess this is the best time for it to happen as I have exams coming up and should be preparing for those, but as I said in the title OMG - WTF!

My current set up had 2x 1tb drives stripped in a RAID configuration. I'm considering getting an alternative set up this time round, such as an SSD boot and a 1tb WD Black edition drive. Many of you guys already run this kind of configuration, what advice would you give to me for setting up a system this way. What are your SSD drive recommendations?

I'm thinking about getting something like a 120gb or maybe 2x 60gb models and then running them in raid as I have seen these for a little more than the price of a single 120gb drive . Any thoughts on these?

OCZ 120gb
OCZ 60gb 
Corsair 120gb
Corsair 60gb

If anyone has ideas on recovering the current set up then that would also be appreciated, at least for long enough to get me game saves off the system!

I run a very slim boot so I just have a 60gb. I only keep my OS and any basic programs I run on it (advanced programs such as PhotoShop I have on a different computer). Everything else I have on separate drives. One for games, one for downloads, one for temporary storage and a NAS for long term backup and storage.

I also want to put crucial and intel into the mix. But I think the ocz vertex 2 seems like a decent SSD. Crucial is really fast, but I haven't been keeping up with the fastest new SSD drives, i'm sure there are better recommendations now.

About your crash, not sure, can you reformat? If that doesn't work, maybe one of your drives is dying, do you heard a clicking sound over and over? Hope it isn't some virus either.

I run a SSD with a WD black hardrive as you said. Look the first drive doesn't have to be big, none of the storage goes on that. The storage and games are suppose to be on other hardrives. So using a 60 gig SSD, is enough for windows, a few programs and also all the windows update which should take over 30 gigs. 60 gigs is enough if you want to save money, but of course 120 gigs means you can install a few games at a time. I rather put my games on a second hardrive.

Yeah you would get that sort of speeds, but also think about the burst speeds and the technology behind a cacheless platterless drive. It's very fast and my point is, how much faster do you need thing when things on SSD are instantanous? You think you will even notice the difference when one drive is faster than anything you ever seen from a traditional hardrive?

 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148447&cm_re=crucial_ssd-_-20-148-447-_-Product

Anyways, check this out, 415mb/s read speed, 95mb/s write speed. Doesn't matter about the write speed, unless you are always installing things. If I didn't buy my SSD drive back then, which is slow, I would of bought this one instead.

Good luck with your decision, also if your willing to spend like more than $350 on hardrives, maybe you should put that towards a mobo and intel i5 2500k cpu.

I hope you mean you are going to install the operating system on the SSD first, then adress the failed volume next.

Right, I grabbed myself a 500gb HDD, installed WIn 7 and then booted with the raid volume connected, I can see the raid volume so I ran chkdsk and it repaired 2 files in the EA folder and then checked it again and no errors were found, but when I try and boot from the raid drive I get a disk read error and can't start my PC.

Any ideas anyone?

I don't run my pc with raid, so I don't have the experience to talk about it. But did you isolate which particular drive was the problem? You can try to use one of the raid drive at a time and start checking it. Rather than both while you boot up with the 500 gig windows 7 drive. That's what i'll suggest, not sure if it will work. Just use the other ones as storage drives and check it.

Sounds like one hardrive might of physically failed somewhere and is about to go. That's only my opinion, not psychic.

I'm not totally sure it's your RAID that's messed up, if it were it isn't very likely at all you'd be able pull data from it in the way you did. You seem to be trying all the right sorts of things though, only thing I can suggest is (you're already doing it but it's worth saying again) get everything you don't want to lose off of the volume, then I would try approaching the situation as if it were a single drive i.e. maybe a bad mbr?

Wait, boot priority in the bios? Lol, that happened to me so many times before. I didn't remember, thought maybe there was an error in the drive or something. I've been there and done that. Everytime my cpu fan fails, or I had to turn off the pc manually, I have to go back and set the boot priority again.

I've been running with an SSD for my OS and core apps (Photoshop, Premiere, Office, etc.) along with a couple of fast 2TB drives and it's definitely been a great experience. I would recommend to stick with a single SSD at this point since while RAID definitely has it's advantages, you will lose the ability to use TRIM, which can be a very useful feature that helps a lot with SSD maintenance. In terms of drives to get, at the moment the OCZ Vertex 3 series seems to be best option in terms of performance that still relatively reasonable price-wise. Well that is if your motherboard supports SATA 3 or you have a SATA 3 PCI-E card.

Wait, you mean you didn't select the hardrive as your first boot option? then disable the rest? I thought that's what you mean. Does that mean you need to boot from a disc from now on?

Trim support, basically what that means is for SSD drives is that SSD drives only have so many writes it can make before it stops working. Trim support writes over it in a special way bypassing this write problem and really extends the life of an SSD drive. My ssd drive has native TRIM support.

... I would recommend to stick with a single SSD at this point since while RAID definitely has it's advantages, you will lose the ability to use TRIM, which can be a very useful feature that helps a lot with SSD maintenance...

i got myself a 120 GB ocz vertex 3 max iops the other week , its great so far.