Windows Experience has dropped!

You need to turn off Windows Aero, and then go into CCC and reduce all the setings to performance. Make sure you select "use application settings" as well.

This will bring your WEI back up to speed.

I have no idea why your SSD index dropped.  I suppose you did only test this after updating both the BIOS and the GPU driver, making is more difficult to isolate the reason.  I, however, experienced a drop of the index for my primary GPU after updating my graphic diriver. See

 en.community.dell.com/.../19913404.aspx

If I read your comment correctly your graphic portion of the index also dropped after a driver update. While I am not an expert at this I am GUESSING that this may be related to the GPU driver using more overhead for itself the more games it supports.  I was trying to do a re-install of an earlier driver to test that but just can't presently find the time to do so.

And then the graphics driver which AW had factory installed on my system (being vers. 8.762 of 8/3/2010) at delivery last November is not available on the Dell site, altough it was NEWER (and had a DELL reference) than the driver available on that site, so I can't go back all the way to the originall installed driver. GO FIGURE that into the equasion of luck of driver updates. Why was that DELL version never posted yet installed on my system? Was there something wrong with it? 

You may have noted that based on MS info, the Windows Experience Index only tests the first GPU, thus I don't know whether x-fire "enabled" v/s "not enabled" also impacts the results.

Anyway this is way over my head and perhaps the more knowledgeble people on this forum can provide some input.

It's WEI. Go run a real benchmark on your SSD and see if the speeds are where they should be.

Yea WEI isnt the best way to gauge things. SSDs (last time I checked)  cant use TRIM in raid 0. This will cause them to degrade over time especially if you keep rewriting data over them. This is probably your issue.

I agree with C_ronic.  Currently Raid 0 does not support trim for SSDs.  From what I read, Intel will support RAID 0 for SSD's sometime in 2012.  Currently Trim is supported with standalone drives in RAID configuration.  

I also believe the OEM Samsung 256GB SSD drives installed by Dell (at least last year) do not support TRIM in the first place, even in non-RAID usage.  I recall reading somewhere but forgot where, that these OEM version also do not support any firmware updates to make them support TRIM.  Whether that is true, I don't know.  I once contacted Samsung to find out more about my drives' exact specifications but they simply said they do no support the OEM versions and I would have to contact DELL.

So I guess once the live goes out of mine, I purchase (based on user/testing reports/price) new up-to-date "Retail" drives with appropriate support when TRIM is also supported by RAID Zero.  

But then based on Wkipedia, Flash-based SSDs write limitation are 1-5 million or more over the life of the drive which thus should last for a while and therefore I can't see why the would degrade over a short period.  So perhaps this issue is a little bit over-emphasized.  Also SSDs based on DRAM do not have a limited number of writes.  Yes avoiding defragmentation runs (even WIN 7 recognises that and does not include it when scheduling) and avoiding a full format are appropriate to limit unnecessary writes. The same would hold true as to keeping any re-installation of images to a minium.

I have never found any information as to what happens when a write action no longer works for a specific spot on the SSD. Are they simply marked as "non-usable" by the firmware or does one simply loose data, i.e. can't retrieve it?  I would assume the former is the case, hence a one-time slower write when such a spot is encountered and has to be marked as unusable as well as another spot has to be found to write that data.

Using benchmarking programs can also degrade their performance. So only benchmark them when its necessary. Especially with sandforce based drives and benchmark programs like crystal. But it varies from drive to drive and benchmark to benchmark. Could have a big impact or minor.

Here are a couple of good threads about SSD and trim and how to determine if it is enabled in your OS and Drive.

This one if you read thru it will tell you what commands to execute to see if Trim is enabled in OS and your SSD.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprohardware/thread/d06e1cb5-d518-447e-b3d6-db2d580899cb

This one is Support and Q&A for SSDs

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

This link will take you to Intel's site where you can check you drivers, specifically the Rapid Storage Technology Driver.  My Mx17xr3 is about a month old, and when I checked it, I found there was a more up to date version.  I installed it, and have not had any problems.

http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/detect/

Thanks MA250 for those informative links.  Now I know a lot more about SSDs.  

Also had a bad experience when reading .Arnond's Article.  Trying at the end to go back one page.  IE9 stalled and then stalled on every web page I tried, even after a full reboot. Had even trouble to close IE as the message that if failed popped up again and again. A virus scan was negative as was sfc /scannow..  So I ended up with something not so good for the SSD, using my latest  Acronis Image after which IF9 as aspected worked again. Having used a few time in the past an Image to restore the computer, would probably means my SSD is almost fully used (as pages are not being deleted until needed). That is perhaps the reason that when restoring the image the remaining time constantly fluctuated wildly. Perhaps when It requires to erase many pages to overwrite them writing speed slows down a lot causing Acronis to again increase it's remaining time requirement greatly, sometimes doubling its estimates.