Seeking advice for SSD Boot Disk

[MisterMaster]

I'm building an i7-920 based system with 6GB of RAM and an HD5770 Radeo Video Card. I plan to have three 1TB WD Caviar Black drives in RAID 5. I plan to use Windows 7 64-bit Professional as my OS. I'd like to speed up my start-up times and load times of Office programs.

I understand that Windows 7 Professional requires about 14GB and Office 2007 requires under 4GB. All other programs, games, photos, music, etc will be on the regular hard disks.

I'm thinking that 30 to 40GB SSD will be enough for a boot drive. Questions:

1. I'm comparing Intel's 40GB X-25 SSD ($129.99) to OCZ's 30GB Vertex SSD ($139.99AR). OCZ's is faster but I understand Intel is top-dog in this category. Any advice on this choice? Any better recommendations (within the same price range?)

2. Is it worthwhile to get two SSDs in RAID 1 for redundancy considering the purported higher failure rate, or are newer SSDs reliable enough?

Thanks guys.

 

[tecmo34]

1) Intel is still King, so stick with it for the extra capacity.
2) I don't see the need for a RAID1 setup. The newer SSD or more reliable and with TRIM being supported, it will just make it run better & longer.

 

[blackhawk1928]

I suggest go with the Intels X-25X, its got trim which is already a breaker and as a boot drive, read speeds don't matter nearly as much as access times do and Intel's SSD's excel at just that. Intel is the way to go, plus you get 10GB more of space for $10 less. I would expect a drive like this to be up to $200, this is an amazing price for a drive like this.