Full system specs
Q9450
4GB RAM
2 x Nvidia GTX280 in SLI
2 x 750GB Sata2 drives in RAID 0 (these are what I intend to replace with SSD)
Asus Stryker II mobo

Its for 3D graphics design so the faster the better

Looks 'pokey' enough providing that memory has been configured correctly. Presumably, the main bottleneck is getting large graphics files on and off the disk drive, in which case an SSD will help. Have you checked if the system is paging? If it is, more memory might be the answer.

Also, note that RAID 1 will slow down writes to disk drives, although reads will be unaffected.

Finally, if you have been given the task of optimising the performance of a particular graphics package, you will not be able to do this properly without running (and monitoring) the software concerned.

I cant check anything at the moment because one of the drives in the RAID array has bad sectors and Vista refuses to boot. I have installed Windows on another drive and can recover the data from the RAID so as the drives need replacing that is why we are thinking SSDs.

Now I am thinking about a single Sata 3 SSD and a PCIx Sata 3 card...

Thanks for your help

In reply to a post by clmfsh:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

i stuck a jumper on the pins of the drive, which shuts down the power management of the drive and it became stable.

I am interested to know which pins you jumpered, there is only one reference to jumpering which forces the drive into SATA1 mode.

those are the jumpers I used, yes you are right they are suppose to put the drive into Sata1 mode, but the software I used to check , told me it was still sata2, but had no power management.

when I took the jumper off it said power management was back on. i may have put the jumper on the other pins, but I don't think I did.

In reply to a post by clmfsh:

It was and still is a fast drive, but I had problems with it, which is why it is now a second drive. If seagate can sort out the problems then it is a great idea and and is a good step between a normal drive and a SSD.

There is new firmware, SD25 which resolves that problem.

I got it and eventually managed to update the drive and I thought it done the job at first and after a couple of days, I had the same problem.

The drive have got faults as you can tell if you look around the net, which is a shame as it is a good idea. but this is Seagate for you. i always seem to have problems with Seagate drives, not buying another Seagate, the scary thing is that soon we will have even less choice when Seagate and WD buy between them what is more or less the last hard drive manufactures