Question About Hard drives/Program installation

[JOSHSKORN]

I would like to know more information about SSD. Basically with my current computer, I have a 500 GB SATA-II drive which is 80% full. Roughly 200GB is probably from applications (Windows 7 itself, Linux [dual-boot], IM applications, FPS games and development tools such as Visual Studio).

My only experience is with single hard drives, mainly the SATA drives I've always used. From what I understand, the OS and the programs have to go on the same drive, and with my drive usage, they haven't quite made SSD drives of that capacity yet (and price is an issue, too).

I was wondering if anyone with more "know-how" could tell me what my options are. Can you link two or more SSD drives together for a bigger C:\ drive or how does this work, exactly? Is having your applications on the same drive as the operating system a thing of the past? I know nothing about RAID, either. Maybe someone can explain it to me or point me to a link or a good book to read.

 

[Dangman]

Basically the programs do not have to be on the same drive as the OS. So what the common SSD setup these days is that they'll have a larger enough SSD for the OS + critical and small sized apps (40GB+) and then have the programs installed to a fast hard drive or even RAID 0. The "linking" of two or more SSDs or hard drives as one drive to the OS is called RAID 0 BTW. So 2 x 80GB SSDs would be a 160GB RAID 0 SSD.