It may be a little early to be getting a SSD -- there are several moves afoot in the industry that will likely materially affect both the speed and price of drives in the near future. Just a few months ago there were essentially three players in the SSD controller market: Intel whose price was commensurate with it's speed, Samsung who made quality yet slow parts primarily for themselves and JMicron that produced complete and utter crap for ver cheap. Virtually every player other and Samsung and Intel used them until Anand Lal Shimpi of Anandtech exposed them all for what they were.
Since then two new offering have entered the playing field -- and this is really just very recently. The first is a relative newcomer, Korean fabless design house Indilinx. Their "Barefoot" controller appears to mitigate many of the shortcomings of the earlier JMicron offerings while maintaining a similar price point. Being fabless Indilinx cannot guarantee supply of their chips -- until they line up manufacturing capacity with a hired fab like TSMC they cannot supply chips to OEMs and consequently supply is low and demand is high. Guess what that does to your price in a free market? While their product seems to get better with every firmware release, it's still nascent and the prices are relatively high.
The potentially brighter light in this constellation again is Samsung, they have a new, faster controller many "value" brands are supposedly OEM'ing but that again is so recent as not to be backed up by independent reviews or stocked store shelves. Since Samsung's only issue earlier was speed, and the controllers they were using were never built for that having been designed for embedded applications requiring ruggedness not speed like ATMs, it's not surprising that they would return to the market as a player since they are also the biggest supplier of the NAND Flash modules used on virually everyone elses SSDs.
In short, there's a lot going on now and you're likely to get better choice, performance and value inside 30 days.
EDIT: since you're going to be running Windows 7, you'll want to make sure to get a drive that supports the TRIM extension to the ATAPI command set. Windows 7 is the only OS at this time that supports TRIM in-box and also includes a number of other enhancements to improve write latency and operating lifetime. Newer drives based on the Indilinx Barefoot controller from OCZ and Super Talent already do with later firmware releases and it's a forgone conclusion that Samsung's new controller will too since they invented it. For more information:
http://windowsitpro.com/article/art...state-disks-ssds-and-why-is-it-important.html
