I agree with your comments, I fitted out a 6 year old ThinkPad X60 with a Vertex 2 last month and it now feels faster than my Quad Core i5 desktop w/ 6Gb of RAM. *Sigh*. I wanted to ask if anyone knows much about the SMART monitoring on SSDs, and whether it can predict these failures. If they are failing due to running out of "good" flash to spare, then presumably such a prediction should be really accurate - a monitoring program should be able to watch SMART prefailure stats and pop up "Buy a new SSD in the next 6 weeks, or your data is toast!". If they're failing for some other reason then I guess all bets are off, though.