Intel 320 Series 160 GB SATA 3.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive
Review by Timinator : Fast!!!!!

I've had this for three weeks now, and all I can say is WOW! I added this to a brand new laptop with the new Sandy Bridge Core I7 processor, and the thing is lightning fast. Programs open up immediately, it's crazy.

This is the single best thing you can do for your laptop to give it a performance boost! Windows boots up completely in about 20 seconds, shuts down in 5!

Read times are about 250MB per second with write times about half that.

I see prices are rising, I paid $220 here on Amazon. I went with the 120GB model which will give you about 80GB after installing Win7 64 bit. Still enough to work with some HD video, but you will probably need an external drive of some sort.

I chose Intel because of the extreme low failure rate.

Very happy with this purchase, would highly recommend!

Intel 320 Series 160 GB SATA 3.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive
Review by Joelog : Huge boost in speed

Put this in my 2008 White MacBook. Installation was incredibly simple. Just restored from a Time Machine backup.

It took only 4 minutes to create thumbnails for my 25+ gigs of iMovies videos (previously took over 30 minutes). Boots up in about 25 seconds.

Intel 320 Series 160 GB SATA 3.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive
Review by willdeng : Great Solid State Drive. Fast and Reliable

SSDs have come a long way. I remember when they cost over a thousand dollars for a couple gigabytes of memory and even then, the speed and reliability didn't match traditional platter based hard drives. All of that has changed however as I am sure that you've heard that solid state drives can speed up your computer several times compared to hard drives with spinning parts. With new SSD controllers and lower cost per GB, it is becoming a great time to switch over to a SSD. The second generation of Intel SSDs, is a great place to start.

The Intel 320 SSD isn't my first SSD that I've had. I remember installing my first SSD and then wondering, well what is all the hype about. Sure it was a bit faster but the cost to performance ratio at the time was not worth it. I've researched and played around with a lot of solid state drives (I've owned OCZ products and Intel's first generation SSD) and until now I haven't really been able to recommend SSDs to people because they were so expensive. The Intel 320 changes all of that, providing fast speeds and great reliability at a good price.

PROS
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- Boot up and shutdown times are greatly reduced. ~20 seconds to boot up and less than 5 seconds to fully shutdown (results may vary of course).
- Dramatic performance increase. Everything runs more smoothly with an SSD. I haven't done any benchmarks on this particular SSD but just take my word for it. You can search online for more precise reviews.
- No spinning parts. In a laptop, this is important because traditional hard drives use up more power and create heat due to friction so with an SSD, you can save power and stay cooler. Not to mention it doesn't make any noise.
- 5 YEAR WARRANTY FROM INTEL <== this is important because that beats any other SSD competitor out there, Intel is confident about their product or else, they would not offer this generous warranty.

CONS
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- Solid state drives still do not provide a lot of space. It is better if you buy a SSD and put all the programs that you run often on it and then store movies, photos, music, etc. on a external hard drive.
- The biggest factor that is probably setting you back is the cost. The cost per gb for SSD is still significantly higher than that of traditional platter based hard drives. Still, I think the performance is worth it.

CONCLUSION
If you have a little bit of money and you're interested in jumping into the SSD fray, then my bottom line is start here. This is the best place to start. You can't go wrong with the Intel 320 series.

For enthusiasts who demand the most out of their components, the Intel 320 series is still SATA II. If your machine supports SATA III then go for the Intel 510 series or the Vertex 3 series. I recommend the Vertex 3 series because it is significantly faster than the Intel. The new Sandforce controller is just brilliant. Just make sure you have it running in ACHI mode to avoid the BSOD.

Intel 320 Series 160 GB SATA 3.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive
Review by B. Seltzer : quickly pleased

Purchased from Amazon. Installed into Dell T3500. Installation was easy. Data migration was easy. Drive makes everything (boot, application startup, file searches, ...) faster, often dramatically so. The major drawback is that now all of my other PCs seem so slow.