whs, I'm a Newegg customer too, I just logged in and placed it on my wish list. I've been reading, and it looks like Intel is a leading brand of SSD's, just as they are with other components. Plus, my system is Intel based, besides the NVIDIA GPU. It has the Intel Rapid Storage Technology built in. I'll have to check if TRIM support is available for my notebook.
My main concern is whether SATA 3 SSD's are backwards compatible with SATA 2. I've heard it both ways, but in the instances where it did work, the users stated that the SATA 3 SSD was faster than the SATA 2 ones, even with the bottleneck. Honestly, being that my notebook is less than 1 year old, it surprises me that it is SATA 2. It was manufactured in 03/11, with the CPU manufactured in 01/11. Just barely before the Sandy Bridge was released.
Mitchell_A, I'm with you, I need to keep it under $200. If I were still working, it'd be no problem, but I'm living on a fixed income. That's why I decided on a 128GB one, 10GB for my recovery partition, 65GB for my OS, 30 for the 1 VM that I'm keeping, the rest for data. I have plenty of USB Flash drives around, about a dozen 4GB ones, then when the 8GB ones dropped to the former price of the 4GB ones, I snatched up 3 different ones from Newegg that was on sale. Surprisingly, the Transcend one reads/writes faster than my Kingston ones does. Anyway, data storage is no problem for me.
I should have sold that last Samsung HD103SJ that I bought on Amazon, that I got for $49.99, by the time it arrived at my door, the price more than doubled. Finally, it tripled in price. Could have gotten $100 + shipping easily (brand new in the box), and would have gone a long way towards my SSD purchase.
Oh well, I'll get there.
Cat