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- HOTNESS UNHOT
Amazon has the OCZ Vertex Plus Series (OCZSSD2-1VTXPL120G) 2.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive for $77 - $10 rebate [Exp 7/31] = $67 with free shipping. Features read speeds up to 250 MB/s, write speeds up to 160 MB/s and comes with a 3 year warranty.
$67
These are incredible but get the Sata III flavor and go for a bigger one. I put a 180 giger for $119 after rebate. Boots up and ready in about 15 seconds. Well worth it...
OCZ seems to draw a lot complaints about reliability, from blue screening to outright drive death. Samsung and Intel have a much better reputation on SSDs, and only cost a touch more. Intel uses high-grade flash* for the affordable 330 series, and Samsung has a controller superior to the usual Sandforce.
No matter what you get, keep good backups. SSDs are simply not old enough to have shaken out all the firmware bugs, some will even trash themselves with a poorly timed power loss.
One other fun fact - SSDs keep track of how many write cycles are left, and how much warranty time is left, and will throttle writing to ensure that they will make it through the warranty. For example : 3000 cycles / 5 years / 365 days means that you would be limited to writing the whole size 1.6 times a day, every day.
*They put in 5000 cycle "good bin" chips, most other mfrs are stuck with 3000 cycle flash.
If you want reliability and performance skip OCZ all together and get the Samsung 830 or an Intel drive if cost is not an option. 120gb is plenty for a system drive. 60gb are useless.