it'll be a few years before you guys get one then

Buy the time Christmas comes around you will probably be able to buy a 64 - 80GB for $100.00.

Also, Best Buy stocks SSD drives in thier stores.

Ive got 2 of them, one for OS + apps, second for games and theyre indeed brilliant, so i concur with the recommendation.

When it comes to the wear leveling and maximum number of writes, there is absolutely no need to worry with this. I have Intel SSD toolbox installed and it says that after about 9 months of the SSD usage, there was about 500GB written (on the system disk). With this 500GB i am still at 99 percent with the Media Wearout Indicator, so in 9 months the SSD did not wear a single percent off its maximum write "capacity". I saw somewhere a screenshot, where some random fella had 1,5 TB of writes and the Wearout Indicator was at 98 percent. This is pretty good, i reckon it will die due some circuit failure long before those memory cells wear out completely.

I've got a 256 GB one.  I see a little faster performance when booting up, but the biggest difference for me is installing programs.  Blazing fast.  Also, launching programs seems to be much faster as well.  The best thing I like about them, is using an ISO of my games to play them instead of using the optical drive.

Standard platters align tiny magnetic domains to store data, while SSDs push charge (in the form of electrons) into a tiny bit of silicon oxide.  It's the same memory that your BIOS is written into.  While there is a finite write cycle on these (coming from the small amount of damage that happens each time you force electrons into or out of the silicon oxide), it's no worse than what happens to the standard samarium-cobalt mixture that coats your drive; you're doing damage to the crystal structure of that material when you write it or read it.  From what I know, it's more likely you'll lose your drive to heat or electrical shock (SSDs are more susceptible to both of these than traditional platter drives).  That write wearout indicator is looking at the voltage needed to push a certain number of electrons into the gate oxide in and SSD; it creeps up slowly over time as damage accumulates.  Obviously, from other posters, it's not that much.

I got a Western Digital Raptor 150GB and are on my third one now (the fan to the harddrives wasn't working I noticed....) and when the warranty expires and the drive dies I'll get a SSD 160GB+.

Sure they're expensive but I'll take that cost. I'm feeling like one of the few computerenthusiasts who DOESN'T have an SSD....

just a little bit of simple comparison between
1 a seagate 160gb hdd,
2 a verbatim 64gb ssd-go and
3 a gskill phenix pro 128gb ssd,
all sata 2 drives on a sata 2 controller in win7 64 bit in the windows performance score chart

the seagate scored 5.9 (from my experience the hdds all score approx the same ie 5.9)

the verbatim 64gb ssd-go scored 6.1(my idea is that it the lack of latencey for the spinning disc that helps)

the gskill pheonix pro 128gb ssd score 7.6( better controller and faster memory cells).

so my advice is look at the sandforce controller drives, esspecially those with the higher read AND write speeds(higher IOPS numbers)

harpo