Crash & Burn, but from the Ashes.......

If you've never had it happen, then you're either incredibly blessed or haven't worked with computers long enough! Saturday, while working on my project of ripping some movies for the children to play on their new tablets during the pending loooong car trip, my computer died.....spectacularly I might add. Well, it flashed, then when it came back up, the boot drive wasn't recognized at all. I'd say that's more spectacular then the run-of-the-mill, blue-screen or missing/corrupt NT bootstrap file. So anyway, the 6 month (or so) old Mushkin Chronos is somehow toast. I contacted Mushkin today and getting an RMA for it. 

So, the question became, do I just wait for the RMA and have my main rig down for a week or two? I decided the answer was "no", we go on to the "if-then" question. Which is, should I replace it with a bigger drive for the similar cost of the original. Other than the 240Gb drives like the one I put in my wife's T61 which run about ~$170, there was the always bulletproof Intel 330 which Micro Center was selling for $150 (same as Newegg), or do I go the cheap way and buy a small 60Gb for something like $60-80. 

I'm standing in front of the big case of SSDs at Micro Center this morning pondering the issue, when I noticed way down in the lower corner a generic looking SSD with no sign. I asked about it, and the sales guy says that it's a Dell 50Gb SSD that they made a special deal with Dell to liquidate them. After checking, he said that it was $34.99, but they had just lowered it for "Black Friday" sales to $29.99, and that it was actually OEM'd by Samsung. SOLD!!!

So, yes, I'm sitting at the workstation typing this out on this temporary SSD. Now the question is going to be: what do I do with a little 50Gb SSD when the Mushkin comes back?