Recommendation of $100-$180 SSD?

Size is mostly irrelevant. I have read a good chunk of the thread on the OCZ and the whole 25 vs 35 nand as well as the other factors.

I am looking at the Intel X-25's, Kingston V100, Corsair Force, Gskill Pheonix.

What is everyone's opinion of these or others?

dont know much about the others but i am a huge ocz vertex fan. i have vertex 2's running on 3 of my machines with no issues.

If possibly stretch to 200 and get a 120GB sandforce drive.

If you can wait I think within this month sandforce 2 drives will be released and hopefully drive down current drives.

Ya I can wait.

I am surprised that there are 2 votes for OCZ drives considering the "uproar" I read about back in Feb

Don't get the X25-M if you're going Intel for reliability... the new 320 Series is coming out

Ummm the X25-M is perfect for reliability. Though as stated the 320 series is coming out that is faster than that of the X25-M's and does have a lot of sizes (80,120) which would be in your rough price range.

Intel has the reliability factor. I like what Im running (see sig) and haven't had any issues with it since I got them in Oct 09. No formats, no drive clearing, these are limited on writes (because no trim in raid) but reads are fabulous!

Writes arent a huge concern of mine as I will probably offload /tmp /var and /home to other mechanical drives to not stress the OS drives out.

Since this is just a matter of wanting to reduce head etc, I can wait it out a bit (although with computers you can always "wait for the x" to come out... you will always be waiting forever)