SSD Upgrade

Yes you will get twice the read/write speeds going with SATA III. The only benifit of the SSD with games is the begining of each level will load faster (if playing online you have to wait for the other slower loading HDD players anyways), SSDs will not improve you framerate. They are very expensive, i would wait until prices come down more. If you have to have one now then i would get at least 120gb for OS and a few games, 64gb might fit OS and 1 game.

Thank-you. I was a tad considered about the capacity, thought about buying one now for the OS, and a few choice applications, and then a second one for games. Buying 128GB over two installments appears less intensive than buying a full 128GB in one bulk. Since SATA III will greatly increase my performance, have any suggestions for expansion cards allowing SATA III over PCI?

So the thing about SATA II speeds and SSDs is-its still gonna be a hell of a lot faster than your hard drive. By quite a lot actually. If you want an SSD, but don't want to pay a fortune the m4 SSDs look pretty good right now.

I used a 40GB boot drive for a year and a half, SATA II. Its not just boot times that are faster, overall system responsiveness is the big thing. If you really want to see the difference between SATA II speeds and SATA III go browse some articles over at Anandtech. They pretty much test them all. Here's a link to an article.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4421/the-2011-midrange-ss...

You won't necessarily get twice the read and write speeds, its very dependent on the SSD you choose, the controller, and even capacity as the smaller drives are never as fast as the larger ones. Also dependent on the software you are running.

As far as windows goes, you can expect a normal WIN7 installation to be 20GB. You can cut that in half by getting rid of your system cache ( I move it to my data drive), the UAC and a few other settings. I ran with a 10GB install. I typically put my browsers and MSoffice on the boot drive. I also put a few games on there, but really it depends on what kind of game, some of them have huge installations. I think a 60GB drive is a nice size for a boot drive, but I am also much happier with my 120GB.

I just installed my Vertex III 120GB with my new mobo, and it flat out flies. WEI is 7.9. Other benchmarks I'm running about 20% faster than my old SSD, that's overall system performance. Lots of folks will tell you that you'll just load windows and levels faster. I submit to you that those folks don't own an SSD.

The SSD is just about the only piece of hardware that can use the bandwidth of the SATA 6.0 standard. If you but a SATA 6.0 SSD and use it on a SATA 3.0 interface, you will still have killing speed over a HDD. I'd recommend that you look at something like the Revo drive as a solution: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168.... It is more elegant than taking a SATA 6.0 and buying a seperate interface card.

Hehe... That's a life-times worth of lunches of Top Ramen. I mentioned in the first post something about ridiculously overpriced PCI cards  .

The 64GB version of M4 just dropped to $89.99 on newegg.com [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...]. Think I'm going to get one of these now, and pick up another one later if I run out of room.

Thank you, again, everyone. I really appreciate the input. However, I'm still up in the air about a decent SATA III pci card... Any thoughts there?