Good advice on the Disk Imaging software Gunny. I've had bad luck with installing drivers and such that are not essential though....I look at each update and decide.
What I've learned is that all SSDs are not created equal, and that all things can break.
If I were buying SSDs I'd buy a Crucial M4 or a Samsung 830 (NOT THE 840, or the older OCZs!).
The 840s have had major reliability issues, and are slower than the 830s....the 840PRO is fast, but long term reliability is still an unknown on early release samples. Samsung was blaming firmware, and claims that newly shipped drives should be fine, but their early releases were experiencing extremely high failure rates.
RAID 0 is NEVER something you do for reliability....ever....it's like asking for a top fuel dragster to be "reliable" No, the purpose of the dragster is SPEED and if you want a Honda Civic you'll be upset by your dragster. RAID 5 or 6 are reliable...0 is FAST and way less reliable. That's why you never RAID 0 a disk where you are storing sensitive data.
For me, SSDs are fast as heck - I can't think of any normal application that demands double the speed.
SSDs require different care. The easiest way on a Samsung drive is to let Samsung Magician do what it does (and let it run all the time). Run the optimzer that will disable OS features that can corrupt SSDs (like indexing, prefetch, defrag etc) and use it on a TRIM enabled OS.
http://forum.corsair.com/upload/How%20To%20Check%20That%20TRIM%20is%20Active.pdf It looks like there are specific RAID support issues for SSDs, so it's probably best to avoid even the "Reliable" modes of RAID:
"
RAID issues
As of January 2012, support for the TRIM command has not been implemented in most RAID technologies.[37][38] One case where it has been implemented is in post-January-2011 releases of the Linux kernel's dmraid, which implements BIOS-assisted "fake hardware RAID" support, and now passes through any TRIM requests from the filesystem that sits on the RAID array.[39] Not to be confused with dmraid, Linux's general-purpose software RAID system, mdraid, has experimental support for batch-based (rather than live, upon file deletion), TRIM on RAID 1 arrays when systems are configured to periodically run the mdtrim utility on filesystems (even those like ext3 without native TRIM support).[40] For a short time in March 2010, users were led to believe that the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) 9.6 drivers supported TRIM in RAID volumes, but Intel later clarified that TRIM was supported for the BIOS settings of AHCI mode and RAID mode, but not if the drive was part of a RAID volume.[41] As of November 2011, Intel has indicated in the release notes for RST 11.5 Alpha that they intend to add support for TRIM on RAID 0 volumes in the next version of RST.[42] Red Hat has also recommended against using software RAID levels 1, 4, 5, and 6 on SSDs, because during initialization, most RAID management utilities (e.g. Linux's mdadm) write to all blocks on the devices to ensure that checksums (or drive-to-drive verifies, in the case of RAID 1) operate properly, causing the SSD to believe that all blocks other than in the spare area are in use, significantly degrading performance.[43]" 