What's the best SSD for "gaming only" rigs?

[picboy]

Hello, I'm planning to build a very cheap but super effective Gaming PC and considering using SSD exclusively for DX9/10 Gaming. This PC would have 2 hard drives as well as 2 operating system, the mechanical one would hold Win XP SP3 and would be used for storage and every day computing and old games.

SSD would be just for gaming, no surfing on the web, no messenger, no anti virus. Only Vista Home Basic SP1 32 bit and 1 or 2 DX10 games installed at the same time. Which SSD do you recommend with my $110 budget and I don't mind 32GB. I don't play multiple games at the same time, 2 at most. I'm considering these so far:

Patriot PE32GS25SSDR 32GB
OCZ Core Series V2 OCZSSD2-2C30G 30GB

If I follow the manufacturer tips will I still have stuttering even if I just game with auto save disabled?

Any advise is welcome, I haven't bought anything for this PC yet.

 

[JDocs]

Vista is a bit of an SSD killer as far as I understand with the page file(needed by some programs regardless of how much memory you have) and defraging and the like. Rather get 2 mechanical drives. SSD have their place in laptops but since desktops aren't moved around lot (typically) a mechanical drive will do better.

 

[chookman]

Dont know who -1 ed you on that JDocs but i gave you a plus to make up for it.

I read a very good article here the other day about the issues with SSD's and fragmentation slowing them down.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669

OP: If you are getting one OCZ have a new one called Apex its got internal RAID-0 and speeds up write speeds considerably on the older Core series. Dont know if you can get them just yet though

 

[geofelt]

Today, the only problem free SSD seems to be the intel/kingston X25-m, but it is pricey at $400. I think the simplest and best solution would be the 150gb velociraptor, but that exceeds your budget at $179. One other option would be to "short stroke" a 1tb drive. That is, get a 1tb drive, but only use the fastest(outer) 5% of the drive.
The data transfer there is very fast, and seek times will be minimal. You should be able to find one near your price. For $129, the WD caviar black 1tb would be a good pick.

 

[tech_tonic]

Boys and girls, SSD has changed for the better!!
The OCZ Vertex Series SSD's are out of control.
Check this out if you don't believe me:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-vertex-120-gb-ssd-review/

 

[sub mesa]

Don't buy the Apex, two bad controllers do not make one good controller, and it shows in the benchmarks.

Instead of the speed of the flash memory itself, SSDs rely on a good intelligent controller with several techniques that can hide the performance deficiencies from the operating system. 2-phase writes are converted into much faster 1-phase write when modifying a small part of existing data, by using new flash cells so only a program-cycle has to occur, not a complete read-erase-write (2-phase) cycle.

So its using intelligence instead of improving raw speed of the flash cells. If the controllers are improved, there is no reason the same flash memory can't reach 5GB/s and 100.000+ IOps. The key issue here is parallellism. While a HDD can only write or read once at a time, an SSD doesn't have this limitation and could be utilizing many channels together for extreme performance. Obviously operating systems like Windows are still optimized for the slow mechanical harddrive, so it will also need to adapt to the new era of storage.