i was talking with some hardware types and was told that the intel SSD is far superior to the others currently out (something to do with the on-board protocol stack and incompatibilities with the other drives).

i have been told the patriot drives, normally around $80 for 32g.. a rockin price... performs about the same as a normal hard drive due to the incompatibilities making it not worth the upgrade (if i were at patriot, i'd be pushing extra hard to fix those drives before i lost the lead to intel... which is about to happen)

btw... you can get the Intel X25-M 80G drive for $548, normally $740, at buy.com ( link )... slower write speeds (70Mbs instead of 170Mbps)... but for game playing, it's still fast enough