So you've heard about these new, really expensive solid state drives, or SSDs. You heard they were rediculously fast but never got one because of the insanely high price. But no more! SSD prices are dropping fast, and a decent drive can be had for $100-$200 for a 30-60gb drive. But be careful. There are a lot of cheap drives out there that are enticing with their low prices and good tech specs. Unfortunately many of these cheap drives suffer the dreaded "stuttering" problem where your computer freezes for a very noticeable amount of time. So why do certain drives stutter, and more importantly which drives can you trust enough to purchase? This article from Anandtech is a GREAT read. It summarizes the recent history of SSDs, details which drives have issues, details which drives are good, and even explains why they are good or bad! Very long but well worth the read if you are going to purchase one soon.

If you can't be bothered to read, from my experience the only drives worth the money are:
All intel drives
All samsung drives except for the really old first generation SLC drives that pop up on ebay.
Mtron drives
And OCZ Vertex (and any of its variants from other manufacturers)==>although this is relatively new and a little more risky since it may be possible that there are bugs that haven't been found yet.

Be careful if you are purchasing any other OCZ drive as most of them stutter, as well as any other SSDs from other manufacturers that use the same Jmicron controller as most of the OCZ drives (but not the vertex, it uses a different, newer controller that is much better).

If you don't already know SSDs are great not only because of the blazing speed and fast application loading times that they bring to the table, but since they have no moving parts they are less prone to damage if dropped or moved around, compared to traditional mechanical hard drives. In addition, a large number of these drives require less power, thus generating less heat and resulting in longer batterylife, key for many laptop users.

Here is the anandtech article. They also have several other articles on SSDs, but this one does a great job summarizing most of what has happened and is going on in the current SSD market.

http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531