SSD - possibly a use?

Well those who know me may well be staggered by the comments that follow, so get a cuppa, sit down, brace yourself and let's begin :-

I might actually have started to think there is a value case for SSD drives!

Now, this is not in storage arrays - certainly not until array software comes along that can transparently and automatically use these, and when so called 'EFDs' become financially viable (rather than 20x cost of equivalent FC capacity). I'm expecting this to be mid 2010...

But, the value case I've now had first had usage & benefit of is in personal laptop computers.

So earlier this week I had the pleasure of my office IT support dept using HP Radia to roll-out office2003 patches on-top of my office2007 install. Thus rapidly borking my HP tablet PC to a level where it is still being reformatted and rebuilt as I type (3 days later).

Now the interesting bit is that they gave me a loan laptop - a Dell (yes I swore a lot), that despite having less RAM and slower CPU, this laptop appeared to operate in the real-world much faster.

A quick peek and I discovered the Dell was actually using a 64GB Samsung SSD, which if nothing else has gone to show what a poorly written app MS-Outlook2007 is - with the end-user client application being almost entirely IO bound.

The same dataset (mix of OST & PST of about 30GB all offline local) takes about 15mins to load on normal drive, about 1min on SSD. Naturally this is a rather specific use case being a single spindle, mix of multiple IO etc, large % of disk capacity utilised etc.

Even so this has changed my laptop usage feeling so much I'm off to buy my own SSDs (out of my own pocket) to put into my work laptop ad my home gaming rig.

So who has any recommendations for 128GB SSDs for HP 2710p Tablet (work) and normal SATA interface (home)? I've been noodling at these :-

http://www.yoyotech.co.uk/hard-drives-hard-drive-c-36_218.html

http://www.ebuyer.com/cat/Hard-Drives/subcat/Solid-State-Hard-Drives