Those who think the drives are too expensive need to consider the money that is invested into R&D. The fact is that those are very expensive to manufacture, and the profit margins on flash are not great. Yes the drives are expensive, but it is because manufacturing costs are high. Obviously these drives are not for everybody. Would you rather have Intel pay their top Engineers to work on cost reduction before innovation? Do you think all the great technology we have today would be possible, if the leading edge companies were not making money? Can any of you Intel haters tell me where I can a cheaper SSD with better performance today? If it's too expensive for you. Don't buy it. I have not bought one yet because they were to expensive for me. You don't see me crying over it. I want tech companies to continue to innovate because it will eventually lead to more kick ass technology, and the prices will go down. My next PC upgrade will definitely be an SSD!

Nobody is asking you guys to buy it!
For a super duper fast drive , at less than $300 is a steal ! It used to cost about $800.

Just wait a few more years, then it will be quite affordable for all.

I just hope this silicon grab stance could not be realized by Intel Dreams. Hardware vendors is not happy to become intel sluts that all their hardware chips supplied from single producer.

anyone wanna buy a 20gb harddrive for £100?
i'm sure i have a couple kicking around somewhere...

i'll even throw in a 64mb flash drive for an extra fiver

Congratulations Intel on another excellent product. I'm sure the price will come down in time. Looking at the Anand preliminary review, it looks like the only weakness of the drive is sequential write performance. SATA bus continues to hold back sequential read performance for all SSDs.

Ever since Intel got its act together after the PIV wattage/heat debacle, it has been on an execution tear. Looking forward to the ARM vs Atom battle and the Larabee vs fixed function GPU battle.

Not only there are more usage models. But I would wager that most of these comments come from people who never tried a reasonably good SSD.

I also have Raptors, SCSI stuff and whatnot. When you install Windows on Raptor, your reaction will be "well, not too bad!". When you install it on perhaps OCZ Vertex, your jaw will drop and you'll go "holy shit.."

After testing it I bought the SSD from my employer and put the 60GB Vertex in my EeePC 1000H.

Fully loaded with antivirus, antispyware, firewall, MS office, Lotus Notes, Sandboxie, 4 user accounts, etc. it gets to login screen in 15 seconds (about 9 seconds is BIOS) and into fully loaded desktop in another 6s.

Try that with a HDD.

And yes, the 60GB disk is almost empty, even with this install and a nice few gigs of Lotus Notes databases. My usage model doesn't even require more than the 60GB.

for starters i'll takeaway a SLiCe of the 640 GB server SSD an order from the driveThuo. With mushrooms. Just add a pinch of SAS and spin it at 15,0000 rpm. It five o'clock thomeware, innit? Whoo! I hope you won't be expecting a TIP.

Tried old X25 80GB and Vertex 60GB and liked the Vertex a bit better after testing: loading Win7 x64 (BIOS loading takes longer :) ), games and file copy.
With "old" SATA controller AMD SB600
And the Vertex was at that time even a little cheaper. SSD like OCZ Vertex gives major change compared to traditional disks.
Finally there's competition for the OCZ Vertex with the smaller build X25.
Hopefully OCZ can take the same step soon so I can get another OCZ Vertex 60GB (big enough. Win7 x64 plus 4 games (Grid/BF2 etc) takes 30GB)

Gonna have to side with Steve here - time is incredibly valuable to me, and the price of an SSD is a small one indeed to have a system that boots in fifteen seconds flat. Try adding up how much time you spend waiting for computers to do anything, and then reconsider an SSD. I don't know why anyone is complaining about the price - if for you going to "make a cup of tea" is a necessary step for turning on a PC, then fair enough.

Savvy? Someone who spends $200 for an 80GB SSD is precisely that.

@Mike:

Anyone who thinks there is one simple usage model for the entire world is not "savvy".

I churn through giant wafer datalogs. My X-25M turns these monster files into JMP tables in 1/6 of the time my mech HD took.

I just recently purchased a first gen X25-M for a new quad core Ubuntu 9.04 system. I used the EXT4 file system on the 80GB X25-M. The performance is nothing short of jaw dropping. From the time I press the power button to the login screen is 15 seconds. Most of that delay is due to the BIOS which could be optimized to shave off a few more seconds. Once you login to Ubuntu the OS is completely ready. I opened about 20 apps trying to get the PC to slow down and even with all those apps open the file system did not lose any responsiveness at all. Even resource intensive apps like GIMP or OpenOffice open in 1 or 2 seconds.
With the X25-M I finally have a PC that is instantly responsive. It is a dream to use. Once you experience an SSD based PC you'll wonder how you ever suffered with platter based hard drives.
Do NOT get an SSD with a JMicron controller. They suffer from "stutter" on random writes and they PC will remain completely unresponsive for 2 or 3 seconds. The Indilinx and Samsung controllers don't have the stutter problem though, but Intel SSDs are still the gold standard.
Get one for your OS / apps drive. You won't regret it!

You're not going to make boatloads of money selling 2 door cars.. We need someone to provide us the sedan (saloon for you brits) of ssd's. Oh, and price it like a kia.

@Steve-

Anyone who spends over $200 for an 80 gb hard drive for his OS, is not 'savvy'.

Perhaps if Microsoft, and the Linux community had developed OSes that could be written once to an SSD then used read-only, thus negating flash memory's weakest point, then there might be some rationale behind using SSDs as system drives.

But hard drives are fine for me for the desktop; I can go fetch a nice hot cup of coffee while my lappy boots.

Different, of course, in the industrial controls market, but then, windoze and even linux are not used. Tends to use WinCE or a proprietary OS that boots quickly from a flash ROM chip.

Notice I'm talking about NEED, not WANT. I don't care what you pimply-faced basement-dwelling dweebs spend your money on.

In terms of speed (sequential and random small write) these drives beat the crap out of the fastest platter versions (and they take a lot less power and are far more robust [for portability and reliability]), so why do people feel the need to wait until the price/GB level out? Since when did savvy PC users have +100GB boot partitions anyway?

Yeah these are currently pointless for large storage, but for operating systems they beat the crap out of raptors (I know, I use one and several SSDs as OS HDs).

When they get the cost in the same region as normal hard drives then will be the time to shout.

Intel claims its SSDs are super fast?

i claim they are too expensive!