| I note that the Intel starts off being far more silly-stupid-fast than the competitors, and restores to a much better state after "seasoning", still silly-stupid-fast.
Here's the method I did, and I recommend it: get the Intel, put the OS on it, and put everything else on a fast hard drive or RAID 0 pair. Make sure the pagefile/swap is not on the SSD. Anything else of a very temporary write-heavy nature, get it off the SSD if you can.
It still runs silly-stupid-fast and makes Win7 run like it's as lean as DOS. Ditto with Vista. Linux (on my RAID 0 pair of WD 640MB "black" drives) feels slow, and I know from experience that it would at least match Win7's speed, if not surpass it, all other factors being equal.
If you read the later parts of the article carefully, it's not planned obsolescence, it's just a different type of drive with different requirements that OS's just don't support yet.
Observe this quote from the "verdict":
In using the X25-M I’d say that the performance drop was noticeable but not a deal breaker - and the data tends to agree with me. With average write latencies still well under 1ms, the drive maintained its most important performance characteristic - the ability to perform random accesses much faster than a conventional hard drive.
[...]
You end up with a drive that still manages to be much faster than the fastest 3.5” hard drives, but slower than when you first got it.
[...]
I still believe that a SSD is the single most effective performance upgrade you can do to your PC; even while taking this behavior into account. While personally I wouldn’t give up a SSD in any of my machines, I can understand the hesitation in investing a great deal of money in one today.
I believe he's saying that he's still in favor of this upgrade, as long as one is aware of the behavior going in, and takes adequate steps to make it easier to "season" the drive whenever it becomes necessary.
I can tell you this: I've had it in heavy use for 3 months now, and have noticed no drop in performance yet. | 
