SSDs - advice please!

Not a very pleasant sounding title there...

I'm intrigued by the idea of an SSD for my laptop. I've got a reasonably specced out lappie - Core 2 Duo @ 2ghz and 4GB RAM, but a very standard 160gb 5400RPM HDD.

Beyond the standard office/internet stuff I use my laptop for photo editing and it can struggle with stitched panos & TIFF formats that go up to 1gb each. Obviously a lot of the performance in say Lightroom or PS4 is loading the GB from HDD to RAM so I'm interested in boosting capability in that area. Something that's not going to suddenly fail on me and that lengthens my battery life also appeals.

I reckon the absolute minimum for me is 160GB. 30gb goes on Vista, another 16 on my mp3s and I've got at least another 5 GB of programs installed. Add in scratch discs and we've got 60GB before I even begin to use anything for document storage - a lot of which is taken up by libraries which need to be kept on the internal HDD. I'd then want to keep the photos that I'm working on on the SSD and shove them over to Firewire external HDDs when they were ready for archive. 100GB would be a reasonable amount so that I wouldn't have to drag shots back and forth all the time.

Unfortunately SSDs seem crazy expensive now - I could get a 500GB Seagate 7200RPM with 16GB cache for 100quid from OCUK which should be a fairly considerable speed boost as well as tripling my storage. Over on the SSD side a G-Skill 128GB drive goes for nigh-on 300quid...

Is that the end of the story? Simply too soon to adapt for the majority of people and the answer is to wait a while? I'm seeing a few high-end laptops ship with big SSDs and I'm seeing announcements of 1TB SSDs without prices... Are they still very expensive? What kind of performance boost do they give over a laptop HDD? Any guesses as to how long the majority of us will have to wait before an SSD becomes really viable for the kind of usage that I've detailed above?

Feel free to simply supply a link or 2 - I'm well behind on this tech. Just interested :)

There is alot of information in a post i created about SSD's...you can read through that to see if there is anything of use.

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...nce-boost.html

I dont own any so cant offer personal advise.

The only SSDs I would consider are Intel X25-M or OCZ vertex or Kingston SSDNOW (re-branded intel drives) Everything else seems to need a dedicated (expensive) raid card with onboard RAM that acts as a buffer and prevents the drives from choking on small file writes ie browser cache. Obviously you can't put a raid card in a laptop so your choice is limited.

If you need 160gb I would wait until they fall in price. Also it is important to see if your laptop supports Sata 1 or 2, my Advent 4211 only supports Sata 1 so it is not much point me getting a e.g. a Intel SSD as the chipset will bottleneck it.

I bought the Samsung SLC 64gb SSD because I only need 64gb and it is a SLC (should last longer than a MLC). Also it has a Samsung controller (not Jmicron) and 32mb of cache so it doesn't ever stutter. Performance wise it is so much better than the WD 80gb 5400rpm that was in here, but I can tell that the chipset is limiting this SSD.

The SSD uses less power than a normal HD, so I get more battery life and it is totally silent, so as I am writing this all I can hear is me bashing the keys. For me this is the best bit of the SSD.