orcishgamer: This is a very opinionated subject of mine: anything that is not Intel is basically the same quality. Kingston doesn't make their own stuff, they put it together, but are sourcing the flash memory from someone else.
If you pay for the Intel brand name, you do get a better drive, and all the doohickeys you may need to hook it up (extra brackets and such), but you are paying almost 50% more and you may never have a problem that that Kingston/ADATA/OCZ/whatever. The Intel will most likely be a hair faster if you shell out for the godly 520 series or better, but in practice you may never know the difference.
As a gamer with a lot of Steam and other games, I can say those small sized drives won't cut it, Max Payne 3 takes up 1/3 of my drive, I'll be replacing it (the drive) this year or in January. I wouldn't go below 250-ish GB in size and then have a 1.5-2TB platter drive (or home NAS) ro hold your other shit.
sloganvirst: I might go back to Intel drive then - Reason I allowed Kingston is because their RAM is my favorite, never had a problem with it, so I assume their drives would be good too.
But one of our 'merits' or whatever you call it is we use the same brand in all our machines, so Intel CPU's and Intel Mobo's - they don't have all those fancy features but they are designed to last, which is what our customers need.
I would have picked a intel 180GB driver without a second thought, but we need to keep our machines under a certain price range and from our supplier the Intel 330 180GB model is $160, so it bumps the price up quite a bit.
So you would advise sticking with intel then?
Their SSDs are actually the top of the line in SSDs, not like their mobos, which are reliable but frequently lack some of the features that someone like ASRock will stick in flagship products.
For me the Intel is worth it and I recommend if the extra 100 USD makes little difference to you, you will get a trouble free and amazingly fast drive with primo features. I'd start looking at the 520 series, and see if you want something a hair more swanky (I think the 530 series trades a few features for souping others up even more, for example, that might have been 320 vs. 330, though, so double check yourself).
There are very few SSD products on the market that can actually compete with the higher end Intels,, most of the SSDs you see are actually aimed at the commodity market, just above OEM level drives.
