I am just curious about how wide spread they are these days. I am planning to buy a couple as Xmas presents for some people and I wonder if I am being too eccentric with my idea...

I keep an eye on these things, but currently they're out of my price bracket.

I have been thinking of swapping out the 160GB HDD in my MacBook Pro. I may consider the SSD options, but I don't think the budget will cope with a 256GB one...

No for three reasons - don't need one, don't trust them yet, can't afford one.

+1

+1

Until they are the same/less price as a HDD, I won't be buying. I don't do enough disk IO to see the benefit IMO.

Too many other bottlenecks in this laptop, so solving one isn't going to make it any faster. Also I live on a busy road so I don't hear even the noisiest of drives anyway.

Yes, for quite some time now. One of the best PC investments I've made.

Yes, for a little over two years now.

+1

Concerns over reliability and longevity have put me off. Otherwise I'd have specced it in my laptop.

I don't have one and can't afford one at the moment.
Not entirely sure I'd see any significant benefit once the old Mac had cranked up to the desktop.

It certainly appeals but I would really like to see OS X and Windows offering a simple, and easy way to tell the OS where to store things. The impression I get (admittedly mainly from OS X) is that, unless you are using servers to store user profiles, the OS likes to have everything in one place (i.e. all the stuff on one volume).
I know it's possible to move things like user folders, iTunes libraries and all the rest about and do so without the host OS having a hissy fit but it isn't always straightforward. I want to see this sort of thing as a System Pref/Control Panel so you can go in, tell the OS where you want it to keep itself, applications, page files, user folders and so on without resorting to command line jiggery pokery.
Do that and then bunging in a nice fast SSD for the OS/applications/page files and dumping everything else on a nice big capacious hard disc becomes dead easy and a no-brainer.

Would I give one a go if I had the money? Yes I would even if it wasn't straightforward to organise everything the way I think it should be.

As an aside (or perhaps they have spies here) - Tom's Hardware clickey

The example I always quote, when someone is unsure of the benefits:

I ran a full AV scan whilst installing a whole bunch of windows updates, and it still opened MS Word in a split second.

This was on an old Core 2 Duo, with 2GB RAM, running XP.

I'm not denying it would be faster but unless you are regularly doing something that involves frequent drive I/O do you actually see a whole lot of benefit once you've go the machine going? Anything that's heavily processor intensive won't see much of a benefit unless it makes extensive use of scratch/page files or frequently also needs to write out data as it goes along (instead of when you have finished what you're doing and save the files).

Having said that, I'm not adverse to having a go if the old premium bonds pay out a useful amount

I have had one for nearly 2 weeks now, and am really liking it. Game load times are really very good.

Cutting out game load times.

There's also other things like silent running and them remaining cool.

As for reliability, my SSD has lasted longer now than some HDDs I've owned.

I'd like to use one in my laptop.
It has a 500GB HDD. If I remove most of my films and music, it gets well below 100GB used. Does anyone know some software that can resize and clone a 500GB partition onto a 128mb SSD without losing any data. I can't afford to lose the OS as it's OEM and I don't have the CD.