Help me upgrade my hard drives!

So here's the deal: my Seagate 7200rpm HDD failed after about a month. I sent the drive in to Sager, and they sent me a replacement. They were prompt about sending it, which made me happy, but they sent me a drive with 4 bad sectors (probably used - which made me very unhappy! ). I sold the drive to a guy who desperately needed a hard drive, and didn't mind paying a little extra despite the bad sectors, since he really needed the drive today.

So now I need a new drive, but there are so many options out there and I'm not sure what would be best to go with.

My needs: at minimum, 200gb storage. Speed is more important to me, and I'm willing to pay a small premium for a better but somewhat smaller drive.

My price: $300 or so max.

I've got 2 slots, which opens up some options. I could, of course, just get one really fast hard drive (7K500 or whatever WD has). I could also, I assume, get a RAID 0 setup (though I'm not sure if I've got a RAID chip). I've heard that RAID 0 doesn't actually improve speed much outside of artificial benchmarks, and I've seen some benchmarks that back that up, but I'd love to hear that I'm wrong.

It also isn't out of the question to get a small-ish (60-100GB) SSD plus a larger spinning HDD for storage, as a nice compromise to get great booting speeds without sacrificing storage space. But now I'm completely out of the realm of my expertise, and I have no idea what SSD's are worth getting and which aren't.

I use my computer primarily for gaming, so load times and overall "snappiness" are what I'd be going for.

Any input welcome!

 

hmm with that price I'm not sure what SSD to take, since the forum's favorite is Intel X25-M, especially the G2.
But with that price you can get 2 Hitachi 500GB 7K500..
I think that'll be the best setup below SSD's performance. you get the speed and storage

 

I's second that vote for an Intel 80GB X25-M and your choice of 500GB spinner. That'll probably go a bit higher than $300, but it should blow any RAID configuration out of the water. If that's too steep for you, as long as you get an Intel, Indilinx, or Samsung SSD, you should generally avoid all the bad apples out there.

 

2 setups u can have

1. Get an 64 or 80GB Intel G2 SSD as primary boot drive and use a 500GB Hitachi travelstar 7K500 as secondary storage drive..

2. Get 2 7k500's in RAID0.

 

Thanks for the input. I'm going to hold off on the SSD for now, but I just ordered a 7k500 so I should be good for now. It'll be a massive upgrade from my current borrowed Fujitsu 5400rpm. It's a huge jump in price to get even a small SSD, while getting a big spinner HDD is cheap. I just can't justify breaking my budget for such a small drive right now.

+rep all around for the help