SSD buying advice

[Dan-NZ]

I wonder if someone could give me some SSD buying advice? I'm about to start building a Hackintosh based on the mini-itx Gigabyte GA-Z97N-Wifi. It will be a dual boot Windows 7 / Yosemite build. It looks like I'm going to have to use Clover as a bootloader as I'll need use UEFI to have any chance of getting imessage and facetime working. My budget for storage is approx $800. At the moment I'm thinking of using 2 separate 256gb SSDs for my boot drives and either one large 960g/1TB SSD for data (mainly home movies and photo storage). Alternatively I'm interested in setting two 512gb/480gb drives up in raid 0 for data storage if this is possible. This larger volume (either the single large drive or two raided drives) will be formatted in exFAT for access from both Win 7 and Yosemite. To clarify this will be either a 3 or 4 SSD build.

My questions are:

1. Where should I spend most of my money? Should I buy two high performance boot drives eg Samsung 850pros and then a more mainstream larger drive as my data drive eg an 850evo or Sandisk Ultra II? Will I notice any "real world" performance difference compared with a cheaper drive for the two boot drives?

2. (And forgive me if this is answered elsewhere) Are there major issues getting a raid 0 (non-boot) volume recognised with a UEFI boot in a Yosemite / Hackintosh build with this motherboard? Because of the way import duty is charged here in New Zealand it makes more sense (costwise) to buy two cheaper smaller drives (which will likely avoid duty) than one large drive that will almost certainly attract 15% when it reaches my shores.

Many thanks for any advice!

 

[Dan-NZ]

Answered my own questions...

Samsung 850Pro probably not worth the extra $$ over the EVO for my use - I went for 4 850EVOs
The Intel RAID is semi-software "fake" RAID and only works under Windows.

What I ended up doing was using OS X software RAID for the 2 500gb 850EVOs then installed MacDrive Pro on my Win 7 install - the RAID array is now acessable within Win 7 AND Yosemite. Seems to work fine, although Outlook didn't like the data files living on the RAID array.

 

[enraginangel]

Do not buy anything with TLC. Numerous problems. Apple has had problems using it in their iPhones. Samsung has had leakage problems in their 840 EVO. If you have a choice, don't buy TLC to save yourself a headache down the line.

 

[91ajames]

one question, why buy a big massive storage for an ssd even thou more expensive when you can have all your files ok on an hdd?

I have a Samsung SSD 840 Pro 128GB for the os and other apps with other downloads for and the rest is on my HDD including 1 3tb drive holding our collection of movies and tv shows to run it off our apple tv..