I have been putting off the move to SSDs for ages now, mainly due to cost, but the disk I/O on my machine was becoming an increasing bottleneck from what I could tell and there is more multi-tasking and juggling of responsibilities at work. I have been running 2x Western Digital Velociraptors in RAID 0 for the last few months and apart from one drive failure I was really pleased with the performance, especially coming from a RAID 0 7200 RPM laptop hard drive configuration on my soon to be retired Dell XPS M1730 (Almost 4 awesome years of service and still under full warranty from Dell!).
I decided to take the plunge into the SSD world yesterday (Early Christmas present to myself and well timed as I will be working through the holidays) and with it being a choice between the Intel 510s and the Corsair Force 3 Series (OCZ Vertex 3 is not that easily available around here), I opted for the latter due to comparable performance in most areas and much smaller cost. Installation into my Thermaltake Level 10 GT chassis was simple enough once I ditched the 3.5" brackets the SSDs came with and just used the GTs own removable brackets which have support for 2.5" drives. I also decided to stick with RAID 0 despite there not being TRIM support on the SSDs in RAID currently, but this is seemingly going to be there in a future Intel RST Driver release from what I have seen online and there are conflicting opinions on how much of an issue it actually is if a machine is left to idle/garbage collect etc. Below are the benchmarks in ATTO and also the WEI results (Ignore the CPU and Memory, it's a result of different overclocking settings on the i7 2600k) used.
Drives used…
2x Western Digital Velociraptor 450GB 10k RPM SATA HDDs - WD4500HLHX
2x Corsair Force 3 Series MLC 120GB 2.5" - F120GB3-BK
…with the SSDs obviously being far smaller (Which is not an issue as I will keep the Velociraptors in a RAID 1 config for important data/archiving etc) but both have full SATA III 6Gb/s support.
Velociraptors:
Force 3 Series:
So from a straight benchmark point of view, the SSDs obviously run away with it by some way, but it will be interesting to see what a difference it will be for real world/general productivity when it comes to day to day activities including general applications, Visual Studio etc.