Whoops, I fucked up the spelling on to SSD or not to SSD, that is the question.  
 
This isn't a SSD (solid state drive) vs traditional hardrive debate, i'm just asking you what I should do tommorrow. I'm building a pc, If you asked me a few months ago whether or not SSD drives are worth it, I would of laughed because they weren't. However now that sort of changed because with mail in rebates, I can get one for just a bit over a $100 with at least 64 gigs. That's probally enough since I looked up my program folder and it's only 22 gigs after all these years.

 
Here is my other dilema, I was originally going to use a western digital 1TB 64mb drive and it's going to use sata 3 speeds because of the X58 mobo and it supports it. I want to know how fast is that compared to a kingston 64 gig SSD drive which isn't the fastest. I also have the faster OCZ option too, however I want the kingston drive because for me I don't have to use a rebate form. The problem is I have to make up my mind tommorrow. I was thinking, since i'm trying to future proof my pc so I don't have to upgrade for years and that windows is going to be stuck on one hardrive and a mobo, I might as well get an SSD now instead of a traditional hardrive which I might regret later on. I mean on the one hand I have more gigs with the western digital, it's enough to install a lot of games on it. Or however paying a bit more, worry about the other hardrive later when I have more cash. I mean building a new pc, I feel like i'm spending cash like it's going out of style, what is $100 more? I wouldn't ask this question if these SSD drives weren't more affordable today.
 
Or the third option, just invest in both, get both the kingston SSD drive even if it's not the fastest SSD drive on the market, then get a traditional hardrive. That's like less than $200, however that's alot, I could of spent it on a 2TB green drive instead for storage and use the 1TB western digital sata 3 as my main drive. I mean I wouldn't mind windows and all programs loading very quickly. However maybe this western digital at sata 3 speeds might be similar. Any advice would help, I didn't really think I was ever going to consider a SSD drive, now that I have the option to, I wish I did more research. What do you think I should do?

Great only pc gamers knows what i'm talking about, everyone else is like lol wut? I like consoles and I like cake. I wrote this thread for the pc section of the forum btw.

Great i'm part of a dying breed of gamers who likes things fast, higher resolution, triple the framerate and without limitations. I'm sure i'm getting a better response here than posting on tested.com where everyone is probally clueless. You realise none of this is helping me make a decision.

Is there a way to combine 2 hard drives for faster performance? Is it called RAID?

@HitmanAgent47 said:

"@Praab_NZ: What if I got a second western digital hardrive and run it at sata 3 speeds, the first drive is mostly for loading programs. Why do this? because I can. It's cheap and I might regret it later on if I don't. I don't want to move the operating system, then have to call microsoft to get a new cd key telling them i'm only using one operating system on one computer ect, or lying to them my hardrive died. I know you can't change your mobo or hardrive with the operating system without having to contact microsoft for a new cd key. I will probally get a second hardrive, or is that a waste of money? "

I'm still of the opinion that SSDs are mostly so unreasonably expensive and if you're going to do anything you should simply get a smallish Intel-based SSD as a boot drive and a ginormous platter-based disc for your data.  
 
But that totally depends on how much storage you need in that computer. If you're running multiple computers, I'd suggest getting some sort of centralized storage set up (probably a NAS) so that you have an always available repository for media files. That way you don't need to have so much storage space in each individual computer. 
 
If that's not the case, then I'd go with the terabyte drive and an Intel X-25 (the largest capacity you can afford). I know at one point in time they were pretty much the SSD to get, although that knowledge is probably outdated by now. I haven't been keeping up with SSD benchmarks at all since they're all way out of my price range for the storage capacity I need.

I like it, they're fast. They're just way too expensive still

" @HitmanAgent47: lol, i guess thats up to you, I made the active decision that I wouldn't care about windows load times in favour of better game performance (I had a budget for my PC) and so far thats remained true. "

" @Praab_NZ: Hey here is the mobo i'm going to buy this week. Is this a sata 6? it said 6gb per second. How fast will this be compared to a SSD? will it even be comparable? I haven't looked at the numbers, however SSD read and write can go up to like 270mb per second or around those speeds. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131641     "

You'll find that even a game like GTA IV, which is the most intensive of thrash paging, will not benefit more than the region of a few frames.  
Although @Seriouslynow, you are correct for oblivion and fallout 3 (Same engine). They are not coded... good. But huge performance boost? More like it doesnt stutter for about .5 of a second when you reach a new cell region.

@AndrewB: Thanks for the info.
 
I was looking at reviews for the western digital black, it seems like it has a 50% failure rate. So much for wanting to buy a 6gb per second hardrive that doesn't even detect that without a firmware and it dies very quickly. That's really dissapointing.  
 
Look i'm not going to use the SSD drive for gaming, i'll install like one game on it, crysis and that's it. My steam folder will go in the second hardrive along with a ton of other games. Maybe I should just get a samsung spintpoint 1TB instead for like $70, or get like two of them and maybe use it in raid. Or get a another 2 tb green drive for storage, yet the first one is for games.

Yeah, get the SSD, it looks like its the kind of performance boost you are looking for. 
I have a spinpoint F3 and a F1 1tb and they work great. But yeah, for a regular HDD, 6gbps doesnt make any difference, SSD's are yet to max out near the SATA 6 speeds so like @AndrewB said, its more for futureproofing. 
So you dont really need a board that has SATA 6 right now, but its a good idea to get one.

Since alot of these western digital 6 gig per second drives are failing, maybe i'll just put more money towards a better SSD drive than kingston, which is the slowest SSD drive. Maybe invest in something like OCZ instead. Or geta  bigger SSD drive, however I can't fit all my steam games on it. Maybe I will just have to install a few games at a time, finish those, then move onto the next game uninstalling those. I'll do this for a while, however I have to research another hardrive. So far all i've been using are spinpoint drives too. None of them has failed on it, it's such a failure that western digital will make such a faulty product. It's like russian roulette.   
 
I sure as hell won't get a segate hardrive, since most of them are unreliable.  
 
For that board, I need a future proof board that can suppport both sli and cross fire at 16X 2.0 speeds for my i7 950 cpu. That sata 6 feature was just a bonus.

"

You'll find that even a game like GTA IV, which is the most intensive of thrash paging, will not benefit more than the region of a few frames.  
Although @Seriouslynow, you are correct for oblivion and fallout 3 (Same engine). They are not coded... good. But huge performance boost? More like it doesnt stutter for about .5 of a second when you reach a new cell region.

"

@SeriouslyNow: 

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R xray engine, while not quite the same deal (It loads one levels geometry at a time, streaming non AI details as you approach them), it still tracks all the data for all the NPCs, environmental effects, anomaly changes, etc etc all in real time all across the parts of the zone. I see no stuttering in that game. 
But dude, calm down, I didnt pull any numbers from anywhere, If i say 'about' it means I have no idea about the actual load times and am simply guessing based on my experience.  
I dont profess an understanding in the specifics of fallout 3 game code, but theres no way it can be complex enough to run badly (Stutter) on my system without them doing something wrong. 

* Maximum sequential read speed 285MB/second

* Maximum sequential write speed 275MB/second

Wow, that's the cosair's SSD drive, that's like 100mb faster than the kingston SSD drive i'm going to buy. Maybe I should invest in more, however it seems 60, or 64 gigs are now cheaper these days and probally enough for me to work with all my programs. Still i'm seriously thinking about an OCZ SSD drive, it's a bit more, however it's so much faster.

Having said that, I still need another 1TB hardrive. I don't trust western digital enough, maybe I shouldn't care about the sata 6 feature yet, however in the future when those drives are cheaper and reliable, i'll consider it as a second hardrive. I still need a hardrive for games, I mean my last 500 gig spinpoint isn't even enough for my steam games, I had to uninstall like alot of games these days. I have no more room to install new games, so it's good I move onto a newer and better platform. I'm going with the samsung spinpoint 1TB, if anyone else has a suggestion for my second hardrive, let me know. I am going to make a decision and start to buy some of these stuff tommorrow with a bunch of cash. I'm also picking up the antec 900, so I save gas money by buying more stuff in one day. Or maybe I can hold off on buying a new hardrive, just buy the damn SSD drive and use it for a while installing few games as possible. I wish there wasn't that installation limit things for DRM, makes reinstalling games annoying.

I just got my first ssd system (new laptop) two weeks ago, and if you get one, you risk ruining your patience with any non-ssd system. For gaming, it's better on anything that uses streaming loading of stuff, e.g. less stutter when the game has to load things.
The place that it has totally changed my expectations of performance is in simple responsiveness. You click a program and it just... opens. No lag while the drive spins up, no rotational latency, it just GOES. It might sound like a small thing, but my desktop still uses an Hd and there's just no comparison in day-to-day use. If all you care about is holding tons of games, you could probably skip it... But if you care about having a buttery smooth and lightning fast system in general, I swear you won't regret getting a decent ssd. If you can spring for a hard drive for media storage, all the better. Get a cheap reliable Hd and spend the cash on an ssd big enough for your OS and program files. Seriously, it's worth it if you have the money.

It's a custom raid0 Sony setup. Comes standard with the laptop. Which is actually a bit annoying, since it makes it nearly impossible to upgrade. If I were you, I'd either get a crucial c300, or something based of a sandforce controller, like an ocz agility 2.
Just ran a quick benchmark and under the ideal circumstances you'll see in spec sheets, I was getting 300mb/s sequential read, and 280 mb/s sequential writes on my laptop.

The only benefit you'll really see is in load times (which, admittedly, is nice - as are the three second Dragon Age II load times). You have to decide if that's worth the price for you. Remember that you'll need a good 10% of the drive space to remain free before drive performance will degrade. And if you're running Windows (ugh) 7, you'll be looking at maybe 9gb used there. So with a 64gb drive, you'll have about 45gb of usable space. That won't get you far with something like Steam. I have a 120gb drive and I have to be selective about what I do with it. A decent 120gb drive will cost you about $300.  
 
For most people, I'd just advise that they hold off a little longer. Prices will continue to come fairly rapidly in the next year or two and the average user can put that money to better use, elsewhere (such as RAM or your video card). Having almost instant data load times is great, but if you can wait an extra ten seconds here and there, using the cash to help boost things that will increase your overall experience will benefit you more. 

I really want a SSD for my boot drive on both my PC and my Mac, but the price tag on SSD's is still a bit insane, at least if you want a quality SSD drive that wont crap out after a short life span.

From what I understand the best and cheapest way now is to get a relatively small SSD say 50 gigs or so, then get a larger traditional platter hard drive, you use the SSD for all important programs, and the platter based drive for files and such.

I caved in and bought it. It was only $104 which is a steal, everywhere else it's like $140. Sure it's the slowest of all SSD drives around this size, however it seems reliable because there weren't many reviews that said it was defective. Also I don't want to wear out the drive too quickly by having such fast read speeds. Sometimes other drives doesn't bench as well, they exagerated their numbers, however it's faster than any other traditional hardrive out there.

  
I'm not going to open it, I just want to buy one for now and if there are better deals in a week, i'll exchange it.

Great, maybe you could post your experience with it if you choose to use it.

Performance degradation is an issue if you are using a drive/OS without TRIM support. Seeing as you're running Win7 with a modern SSD, degradation shouldn't be a big problem. The issue as I understand it is that when a piece of data is "deleted", the space it was taking up cannot be overwritten unless the prior data is actually cleared. Thus, the SSD has a fair amount more housekeeping to do than a magnetic drive. Since the OS doesn't really tell the drive when a file is deleted and the space is once again open, the drive can't clean and prepare the memory ahead of time. The TRIM command allows the SSD to perform a lot of the housekeeping on it's own. Good article here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2865

Cached SSD via SATA2 interface is older tech.  What you really want for proper, full bandwidth saturation and performance, is a PCIe card SSD with a Sandforce controller.  Super expensive at the moment, but the real future of SSD until USB 3 SSD solutions come into play.

SSDs are too unreasonably expensive for their price and lack of space. The only reason why you might want to use a SSD is for only the OS and maybe a few other programs; but even then you need to put down about $100. 
 
I'd wait until the price goes down.

" @Branthog: Money is not an issue, i'm already going to get really powerful components of today, not the best, however good enough. I don't mind buying a second spinpoint for my steam account instead or other boxed pc games, i'll only install like a few games on SSD like crysis to try. I'll only install games I get in a box, not steam games.  

SSD drive can speed up my system more than spending other 6 gigs of ram.   For the thread, one thing about these SSD drives are according to wiki is that over time they start to degrade in performance. I don't think that really matters considering how fast these things are.  

  I just hope a few years later, it doesn't eventually die because my operating system is tied to it. I rather use this than a spinpoint hardrive as the main drive my operating system will be tied to for many years. That's going as a second hardrive, might add another western digital 2tb green drive later on as a storage drive, hopefully it's not loud and stuff. I've been googling alot of articles and it does fail, there is a higher failurerate than traditional hardrives, so it's something I have to consider. "

My friend works for a retailer. He is part of something called the "Intel Edge Rewards Program." He gets points on the products he sells in store and that point translates to tiers where he can get products for cheap. He got a 80gig SSD card for $120. He has placed Windows 7, Photoshop, Audition, Premier, FL Studio, etc on the SSD and he has been really happy. Photoshop and Win7 load and run extremely fast. It's very nice. 

I got an Intel 80gb SSD and installed win7 64 bit, a 1tb WD Caviar black sata 6, and trust me, its worth every single penny i spent.  Speed, load times, frame rate. AMAZING. 
 
i7 930 OC 4ghz
gee-force 465 oc
6gb ram
asus mb with  p6x58d-e i think 
and v6gt aircooler i forget the MF
samsung syncmaster px3770 monitor