SSD vs 3 HDD's with RAID 5 configuration

[ukballer1012]

In my next gaming build I am trying to decide whether or not to use SSD or HDD for my hard drive. I understand all the differences between the two so that is not what I'm asking. Price will play a big role. I think right now a SSD is like $1.00/GB whereas HDD is $0.10/GB? If so wouldn't it make more sense to use 3 HDD's with RAID 5 configuration set up on them? If so the 70% cheaper method seems more appealing to me, however I haven't accounted for the HDD controller(s). I'm mainly asking this to people with experience between the two as I have never implemented a SSD into a system before. Assuming I buy reliable HDD's (@7200 or 10000rpm) wont the cheaper method be fast enough to the point where I was better off not paying 70% more? I understand boot time would be faster with SSD but I'm not extremely impatient and I understand cooling the system would come into play but if I'm building a gaming rig I'm going to use a good cooling case, maybe one in the BTX form factor because 3 HDD's might obstruct the airflow in some cases, but I'll have case fans and probably some bay fans to cool the HDD's. What are your thoughts on the matter?

 

[OhSnapWord]

Good luck finding BTX anything. A lot of that stuff has been discontinued. RAID 5 is nice for redundancy however the write performance suffers because the controller will be writing the parity bit.

For RAID 5, I'm fairly certain you need to get "RAID Class" hard drives. The only thing special about them is you can change the error recovery control feature of the hard drive's firmware.

I'm running a RAID 0 myself and it is fantastically fast. My average throughput is about 250MB/s, which is similar to a SATA II SSD.

Of course a SATA III SSD would be about 2x faster.