OCZ Vertex 2 Series solid state drive - 60 GB - SATA-300

The OCZ Vertex 2 SSD's are very quick and come in plenty of variations of capacities.

Capacity

After owning the 90GB version, I made my dad purchase this 60GB version. Vertex 2 SSD's can also be found from as little as 50GB and up to 480GB.

Reliability

The actual version he got was the 3.5" version. Unlike my 2.5" one, he has had no problems at all.

Installation

There isn't anything special about the installation really, all you really need to do is ensure that it is in AHCI mode in your BIOS so that all the extended features can be supported, E.g. TRIM. This may be a bit tricky for people with no experience with the BIOS

Speed

This SSD is extremely fast and can achieve around 280MB/s read and write.
The Vertex 2 model of SSD from OCZ features an amazing 50K IOPS and has seek time of 0.1ms which is a vast improvement over a conventional HDD.
My dad's PC was pretty slow at most things before this upgrade and took 3~5 minutes to load but now boots in around 15 seconds.

Maintenance

There is absolutely no need for de-fragmentation on SSD's so no waiting around for that drive to defrag.
Updating the SSD's firmware is really simple and can be found on OCZ's website

Useful Notes

Before re-installing an OS, to prevent the SSD from losing performance you should issue the "ATA secure erase" command. (Just search for "ATA Secure Erase" for a how-to.