I hesitate to recommend something that I have not personally tried, but for Crucial I am prepared to make an exception. Last year I made a test buy of the reasonably priced and 6Gb/second SATA III interfaced Crucial C300 Solid State Disk (SSD).The performance tests, with the all important sustained write speed of over 70MB/sec even for the slowest 64GB disk won me over.
Since then most loyal Crucial customers have been eagerly awaiting the next generation of SSD disk the m4. In the late European hours of Wednesday 27th April it became available.
No doubt competitors will be worried. The m4 series is priced at the same level as the outgoing C300, but delivers better Read (415MB/sec) and Write (>95MB/sec) performance.
I do not think the time is right to place bulk data on SSD that is too expensive, but placing your Operating System, or changing to SSD powered notebook drive will return a great performance boost. Don't forget these drives are now so fast they exceed SATA II (3Gb/second == 384MB/sec) limits, so you really need a SATA III (6Gb/sec == 768 MB/sec) connect so that the drive is not limited by the interface.
So the only question on most customers minds, is which one(s) does one order, and an order be placed before the initial stocks run out.
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