If i were you i would buy the EVO, instead go back empty handed
Other choice would be Plextor, Sandisk and Kingston SSD.

1. The only point for Dual SSD is, RAID0, it's like SLI/Crossfire but for SSD, no point for one SSD for OS and one for gaming, it's waste of money, waste of space on HDD cage lol.
2. Intel, Samsung, Kingston, Plextor, SanDisk, Crucial, if Samsung 840 pro 256GB is within your budget, just grab it: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6553/sandisk...-review-256gb/6
3. Don't download torrent/DDL and save to SSD. SSD chips has limited write cycle, i will reduce the SSD life span in the long term.
4. only reduce gaming load time. wont increase FPS for most scenario.

Evo, if budget allowed; SanDisk Ultra Plus performance is not that good, unless it's significantly cheaper than the rest.
Can consider other brands like Intel, Plextor, Kingston, Crucial etc.

Not sure if it's a good timing to buy OCZ products since it's already filled bankruptcy, Although Toshiba agreed to acquires its assets, RMA is going to have a lot of hassle i think.

Longer warranty does not means it's good, I own 5 Western Digital HDD, all of them have longer warranty than competitors brands, does it mean they are good?
No, five of them have been RMA'ed. MTBF 2 millions hours it's just a marketing gimmick.
Why not Samsung Evo or 840?

Is it possible? On my AMD mobo, after set to RAID mode, you can't change it back back to IDE/AHCI without breaking the RAID array or bsod upon boot
It's not necessary force to use AHCI mode, as RAID support AHCI functions, but no hot-swapping support; also upgrade SSD firmware will be a little bit hassle, depends on SSD brands.

So now your OS mobo can use AHCI + RAID?
My SSD is stuck with the RAID driver now, i have 2 RAID 0 arrays so cant use AHCI, i dont see any benefits by using it cause i dont hot-swapping, upgrading firmware on my Plextor SSD work without OS(offline updating FTW) so SATA mode is not important, but i lose the ability to check the SMART status of my drives

HDTune, CrystalDiskInfo, but can only check non-RAID HDD, HDTune free version is outdated, cant even bench HDD/RAID with more than 3TB of capacity
HDTune pro are able to read SMART status but not free.

Yes it's almost double, but for only one thing on benchmark, that's Incompressible/random write performance; it's SandForce 2281 controller weakness.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/d...sd_7.html#sect1

It's the best consumer SATA 6GB/s SSD, if you need better you have look for PCIe SSD, or SAS 12GB/s SSD, but i doubt you can fully utilize the performance of those high performance server SSD if you are just only using it for OS boot drive and put loads of games on it

It may affect the performance much, because most operation like file extraction (Winzip/7z/RAR) are extracted to user profile directory, temp files, your save games, personalized programs profile are also stored on same directory.

Just fully utilize your SSD capability, else you spent so many bucks on your SSD for what? either next a a few years you will get a new SSD again.
imho SSD life span are the least worries for normal user.

If you read the previous post, EVO/840 can enable RAPID mode (RAM caching) to double the performance, it's consider as winner already.

You need to install the software http://www.samsung.com/global/business/sem.../downloads.html
It's called Samsung Magician, the double performance wont work with very OS you've installed on your SSD unless you enabled the optimization on every OSes.

Many ppl fell for that, including me lol
For ppl who solely looks for higher performance at cheaper price, go for RAID 0 lah.
if your mobo support TRIM with raid enabled(intel x67 or newer).
You gain almost double performance compare to single large capacity SSD. but lost one sata port, 200% risk of losing data if lazy to do backup

The slowdown is not due to SSD ware off, it's cause by the amount of software accumulated on your system that will set themselves auto start-up after boot, and a lot of non-Microsoft services, background apps(windows 8, apps eat quite a lof of RAMs )

1TB =/ fast, the user enabled RAPID mode which will cache the data to system RAM to improve I/O performance. (which the benchmark data happen to be cached, hence the superb performance)
RAPID mode is exclusive feature on Samsung 840 SSD only and the data has to be cached to RAM to improve performance.
the alternative and much "safer" way is RAID 0 your SSD, although it isnt as fast as RAPID mode, but the performance will still almost doubled.

RAPID mode use your RAM to cache the hot data, RAM caching tend to be risky as our system ram are volatile memory, power loss may result in data corruption.

Err, firmware cant solve such problem, unless Samsung firmware can predict when your pc going to crash or when TNB gonna cut off your power
UPS is the only solution, which will give the SSD limited time to flush it buffer to disk, usually very fast lah, then shutdown pc = problem solved.

If i have the EVO SSD i'd enable it, i mean, why not? extra performance that utilize the excessive system resource, that's smart actually, and they claim otherwise it's safe to use, it wotn be as fragile as RAM disk cache
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/sem..._Whitepaper.pdf

have you initialized it on disk manager already? If you can see your SSD under the device manager, that means your SSD is working, only left disk initialization.