In particular the second-generation (34nm process) version, which have been hard to find lately, although I just ordered an 80GB one from an Amazon merchant who claims to have several in stock.
Only for desktop/laptop use, and only if you don't have extra-high levels of write activity and/or you are willing to replace them on the same 3-year cycle you would use when replacing (magnetic) hard drives.
They don't beg any more replacement than the other SATA SSDs you could purchase. You yourself admit that they aren't any less reliable than magnetic drives.
Not true. There are lots of SSDs with much higher longevity, using a variety of techniques. The Intel X25-M is optimized for capacity/cost, not longevity. Depending on your workload they can very well be less reliable than magnetic drives, especially if judge by the manufacturers' specifications.
Does anyone know what the actual real world difference would be like between the Apple 256 GB SSD upgrade and the Intel 160 GB drive that everyone talks about?
The Toshiba and Samsung SSDs that Apple uses are decent, and leagues better than the Taiwanese shovelware that was their only competition when they were introduced. They aren't plagued with embarrassing pauses, but unfortunately aren't particularly fast either.
The Intel SSDs offer much better performance, but no OEM is shipping them due to supply-chain issues -- Intel isn't even close to making enough for the aftermarket.
Some Googling suggests that Apple's 256GB SSD is made by Toshiba. Since Toshiba doesn't sell any non-OEM version of this SSD (yet), sites like AnandTech won't review it. Given the wide variety of crap on the market, I wouldn't buy anything that hasn't been widely reviewed.
I have a MacBook Pro with the 256GB SSD (it's a Toshiba drive, allegedly with their own custom controller, so be wary of people bashing on Samsung). After reading a lot of articles and using this machine for a while, I've come to the conclusion that the Intel drive would basically involve spending a few hundred dollars extra and voiding my warranty to get a speedup I'll never really notice.
Yeah, maybe I could boot in eight seconds instead of twelve, but I don't really care so much about that; this thing's plenty fast for everything I do, and outside of actually benchmarking it on non-real-world tasks (I don't routinely write huge files, for example) it's just not a difference that'll show up, especially when lost in the noise of other factors.
