What ssd should I get?

I'm looking at an 80gb $200 intel X18, a 64 gb kingston ssdnow @ $140 or if anyone else has any suggestions. I thought of getting something approximately 60gb, but i'd consider more or less too. Price is really the biggest concern and I want to get the best combo of read speed and space for under $200.

x18 is 80 dollars less, and still has ~270mb/sec read speed. you don't get trim, but that's not so bad.

The x18 is definitely not $80 less - more like $30-$40 less if your $200 price is accurate (where would you get an x18 for $200 anyways?). Here's a G2 M for $237 for example (yeah, it's out of stock, but it should be back soon): http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod [...] _SATA.html

Sub mesa - it doesn't have trim because the x18 is identical to the x25-m G1 - they haven't updated it with the G2 controller and 34nm flash yet. It's still excellent - it may not keep up with the G2, but it's definitely faster than most SSDs on the market.

For an OS SSD, the intel used to be the only drive to consider. That may be changing. Do not focus on the read transfer rates, that is relatively unimportant for an OS drive. The OS does lots of small reads and writes. For reads, you will do well with almost any drive, primarily because of the minimal access time. Look an the write capability. If the drive does not have a good controller, you may encounter write delays in the tens of seconds when the drive is hit with lots of writes; that is most disturbing. If you have windows-7 you get trim support, so any drive with trim such as the X25-m G2 will be very good(intel currently is redoing the trim microcode on this). Otherwise, the X25-M G1 works well.

This arena is changing very fast, so a wait of a few months might get you a much better and cheaper drive.