Ssd, ssd caching or ram disk

A ram disk requires you to set up the ram disk each time you reboot. This is the fastest performance option but the most cumbersome to setup and maintain.

SSDs in raid do not give a great performance boost over SSDs. The reason RAID gives HDDs great performance enhancement is the interleaving of the read/writes. You approach double the speed because you have two mechanical spinning devices reading. With solid state there is no great improvement for controller read/writes.

A HDD with SSD caching will speed up the Hdd but will not match the SSD in speed.

The best solution with cost in mind is straight SSDs. The 256GB models are faster than the smaller ones.

thanks heaps for the help. should i just look at read/writes to see best trade off in price/size and speed. don't need large capacity so will try to lower price/size with minimum trade off in size. is trim dependent on the ssd or the motherboard. i plan on having either external storage for things not requiring speed eg movies/music or have a secondary mechanical which i already have in my possession.

A straight ssd would be your best bet.

Take a look at this ssd chart Tom's Hardware published:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-price-ssd,3070...

i think i've decided to go with the crucial m4 64gb