I've tried raid arrays years ago to decrease boot time with mechanical  drives, even though I was able to see an increase in through put it still didn't decrease the boot time.  Even back in those days people were putting in raid SSD's.  Really wish they mentioned the boot time.
  $400 for a motherboard, I'd think that is what most people want to spend for a new laptop.
Carl2

That $400 motherboard falls into the realm of "enthusiast gear", and that stuff isn't cheap. These posts about new tech for our PC's is just a bit depressing, since my desires outstrip my budget, but I love keeping up with all the new kit, so I don't mind, really.

I'm really getting confused about the latest SSD's M.2, PCI express with a series of numbers.  And You have to look at the motherboards to see what they support.   There are also a growing number of PCI express numbers PCI express 3.0x4 seems to be the highest.  Anyways I came across this on a higher priced motherboard
1 x M.2 port, supports M.2 SATA 6Gb/s module* or M.2 PCIe module up to 32Gb/s speed**
- M.2 port supports 4.2cm/ 6cm/ 8cm length module
- M.2 PCIe module does not support RAID 0, RAID1, RAID 5 and RAID 10

* The SATA Express port or SATA5~6 ports will be unavailable when installing the M.2 (Gen2 x2 mode) module in the M.2 port.
** Intel RST does not support PCIe M.2 SSD with Legacy ROM.

also this
10x SATA 6Gb/s ports (2x ports reserved for SATA Express port)*
- SATA1~6 support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 10
- SATA7~10 ports only support IDE mode and AHCI mode
- Supports Intel Smart Response Technology (Windows 7/ 8/ 8.1)

Newegg is usual pretty good at providing info but I'm lost at this point.
Carl2

Carl2 that all looks good to me, what are you confused about.

The board will take the fastest 32Gb/s M.2 and still give you 8 x SATA to connect standard SSD's at the same time. Sounds good to me.

   PCI express 3.0x4 seems to have the fastest transfers, if doing a build I think it's one of the last things I'd buy and put in.  Reading reviews where the SSD isn't even detected and failed SSD's must be making me edgy.  I did see some combo deals with MB, memory and SSD can be purchased together.
Carl2

Seen these Data ?

I need a bigger SSD to fit my Unity and Daz stuff on.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Z400s-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B00Z1NP0X8/ref=sr_1_2

Looks ok, not a bad price for 256GIG at the end of the day. Have used SanDisk SSD's before, no probs with them at all.

Thank you - I'll give it a go next week hopefully.

It's quite an interesting SSD, performance seems about half the speed of the Samsung 850 EVO, so it's not ground-breaking there but its power consumption is lower, it seems aimed more at the laptop market but would be fine in a PC as a storage drive.

Found this:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/sandisk-z400s-dram-less-ssd,review-33390-5.html

Seems fine for storage then

  I just had Nvidia update the drivers for the graphics card, the computer is a bit old  and I was surprised it was being updated.  During the process I began thinking if that update was loaded to a different drive would that speed up the computer.  I don't believe I have anything that really loads down the computer,  possibly Dragon could be a little quicker.  So if we build a computer put only the OS on one drive and move all additional software to another drive, possibly use a raid drive would we see any noticeable increase in speed?
Carl2

Speaking strictly from personal experience, offloading everything except the OS to another drive generally slows the system, rather than speed it up, but it's by a pretty small factor. I've done it for a large number of years now (since Win 98), and this has always been the case for me, so I'm fairly confident in my assessment. Using RAID arrays can speed things up, but the main advantage of RAID is in redundancy, rather than speed. More often than not, with older systems the bottleneck isn't just with long term storage, but a number of factors. RAM, clock speeds, OS code bloat and other factors can represent larger bottlenecks than disk IO, and depending on the age and specs of a system, throwing in a pair of SSD's in a RAID array may not reap the benefits that might be expected. This is a complicated issue, so I'm generally loathe to advise on the issue till I've seen the whole picture.

I pretty well agree with Dave there.

I would just add that you shouldn't even try to install the NVidia driver up-dates to any drive other then the OS drive, drivers should be on the PC's OS drive. Anything else is just asking for trouble.   

So yeah, keep your programs on the OS drive too, the only thing to look out for is SSD space, if an SSD starts to run out of space they can and do slow down a bit. In a "perfect world" you want something like 30% free space.

I've always thought RAID was a bit like overkill for home systems, most people would probably go for external storage instead. It makes most sense in things like servers to me, where you don't want to lose everything at once and could still get by until the bad drive is replaced.

For my SSDs I've gone for 75% full and no more as my target.

that's a good figure to use. Any more than that and the drive will start to suffer performance issues, I think.