i hadn't seen your reply yet MrS when i made my purchase but i ended up buying 2x 480Gb Crucial M500's, (1)because they were cheaper than a single 960GB unit and (2) it will give me the option to either (a)do a striped raid (and still partition?) or ( b ) not raid and not have to partition.
But i guess i could do it the way you suggested, Raid 1/0 combo, though not sure if i'm willing to sacrifice the space since i only have 960 to begin with, and not a full 1TB. Though like i said i'd have to do some research on all of this because i've never owned ssd's before. I've read about striping and mirroring a long time ago but have no experience with actually doing it. If i do raid 0 the whole thing i would definitely need to back up my work more often just in case.
The c drive on my old pc is about 465GB and it's @265GB used. It's actually the slowest/oldest hdd in the system because i didn't bother to migrate my stuff to the newest hdd's. Got a 2TB WD Black that's partitioned into a (M) Media Drive and a (D)Documents Drive and they're pretty much full, and so is my other 1TB WD Black ®Archives drive, the first 32GB of which is used as a (F)PageFile/Scratch drive. Those i'll just keep in the old system, except maybe copy my documents and my working files
I could probably live with a C that's only 300-350GB because right now my old C is sitting on 184GB of free space (maybe even less... will have to look into how much used space is actually just garbage files or programs that i don't use anymore).
As suggested, will definitely look into which 120GB ssd was pre-installed in the new system, to compare performace and stuff. I could use it for documents, but seems like a waste to use an ssd for that.