G71 (BB) SSD question

I have looked into SSDs a lot, and I've decided I was going to purchase one in the near future for my laptop. Here are a few questions I hope anyone here could help answer.

1. I know for a second hard drive you need a bracket to hold it in, so I was wondering if there were any other options then http://estore.asus.com/shop/item.asp?itemid=4316 because it's always sold out. Do a lot of generic ones work?

2. What's the best SSD you could recommend for the 100-180ish price range? Size is not too important to me, but I would like 32-64 or more if the product has good quality.

3. Is about a month from now a good time to buy a SSD, or is it worth it to wait a little bit longer for better ones to come out?

4. I hear people talking about this "limited write" thing or something like that for SSDs, what exactly does that mean? Also on the same topic, people say that SSDs can slow down really fast when you have them past 60% capacity, is that entirely true?

Thanks for the help!

 

1) Since I can't find it on eBay or Google Shopping, I'm going to say that you'l have to buy this straight from Asus for now. Possibly in the future G71 parts will become more commonplace, and you'll be able to get it elsewhere.

2) Anything with an Intel or Indilinx controller is a good choice right now. In your price range, most of the options are going to be 32GB; most of the good 64GB drives start just over $200. Indilinx drives are a little bit slower, but Intel drives have been having some teething problems with firmware.

3) I don't believe that there's anything new coming out in the next few months on this front... maybe the revised JMicron controller... but no one knows how good that'll be.

4) SSDs do have a limited lifespan due to the number of times you can write to NAND flash, but it's going to be just as long as the lifespan of a conventional HDD, if not longer. SSDs do slow down a bit as they're filled, but it's not really that dramatic a drop at 60%.

 

The slow down isn't much of an issue once the drive has trim support. Intel g2 drives will have trim support (they should have it already but their was a bug), the g1s won't though.

The indilinx drives from ocz and supertalent already have trim support for a while now. The corsair indilinx drives should have just gotten trim support.

The 40GB kingston drive which is based on the intel g2 will supposedly have trim support in the near future.

Trim support is something you want from an ssd.