I got the 120 GB drive expecting to just run games from there but I didn't realize how easy it was to migrate my entire existing C drive to the SSD.

Intel provides a migration utility that lets you clone existing drives onto this drive. So I cloned my C drive (my Windows installation and my main Program Files), which lets me boot directly to the SSD as if nothing had happened. It was a very simple process and the software and guides will walk you through it.

So now I am unexpectedly booting straight from my SSD without having to reinstall anything. What used to take a couple minutes to boot up and settle down is now done in seconds. Windows FLIES. So I kinda wish I'd gotten a bigger drive -- I went with 120 GB because I wasn't going to put Windows on it, but since it was easy, I did so ... but my C drive had about 80 GB on it so that was most of my space! If I'd known that cloning was going to be this easy (and good), I may have gotten the 240 GB instead.

One good tip, though, if you do this:
You can save yourself some space on your Windows installation drive by moving your Windows "Users" folders to another drive. In Windows 7, just open Windows Explorer, locate your "Users\YourNameHere" folder and right click on the sub-folders ("My Documents", "My Music", "Downloads", etc), go to Properties, select the Location tab and move the location to a conventional drive. Windows 7 will automatically migrate all the contents to the new location and delete the originals, freeing space on your SSD. Since I have a ton of music and some videos and so forth, this freed up 30 GB from my SSD. There's no reason to have My Music taking up expensive SSD space.

As for overall ease of install, if you're comfortable installing a regular SATA drive, this is the same thing. Only fancy thing I had to do was go into my BIOS to change the drive boot order, and according to the docs, you could just swap cables instead. Note that this does come with a mount, so you shouldn't need to buy anything extra (I want to say it was a 3.5" drive mount? Meh. I just screwed it in with the other hard drives. I'm only supporting it on one side but it's not like it's heavy or has any moving parts anyway.)

I guess I'll see how this is long term, but with a 5 year warranty, it may already be better than my conventional drives.

P.S.
I went with Intel over other brands after reading reviews and comparing warranties. Intel's 5-year warranty was the longest I could find. I might consider a cheaper brand for less essential data if I decide to get a second one but if you're installing your OS, you might want top grade. (Failure in OS = bluescreen.)

P.P.S. (6/2/2013)
I thought I was finally having a serious problem with the drive. Windows kept crashing and signs pointed to the file system. Turns out it was bad system RAM and not the drive. After finding the bad RAM with MemTest86 and replacing it, the problems went away. I now have a second, larger drive to play my games from while the original 120 GB mainly has Windows and other programs.

No matter what your reason for considering this Solid State Drive (SSD) purchase, I definitely recomment this large Intel 520 Series SSD. Let's walk through the decision process.

If you are considering SSD vs. no SSD, you will find that all articles recommend SSD for performance reasons. It really makes that much difference. The cost-per-gigabyte equation can't touch traditional hard drives, so understand that this decision is really a matter of paying for performance. As of Spring 2012, you'll pay up to $2 per GB of SSD compared to perhaps 10 cents per GB of rotational hard drive. As any professinoal will tell you, the performance bottleneck on PCs is I/O, and most I/O is to/from you disk drive. Improving disk performance improves overall PC performance in all applications except perhaps scientific computating. Also, SSD's are less prone to failure because they have no moving parts. They similarly survive better in varying temperature, humidity, and impact (shock) situation. I've seen a Kingston video where they hit their SSD with a baseball bat and then drive a car over it. It still works.

If you are considering a small SSD in combination with a larger traditional drive vs. a large SSD alone, you'll want this large SSD if you can afford the price difference. Using a combination of drive technologies requires some means to manage which files are on which drive. This is cumbercome if performed manually, but that's the best practice recommended on Tom's Hardware (a site I greatly respect). General guidance: install your operating system (OS) on the SSD; install your most-used software on the SSD also; then store your large multimedia files (movies, music, etc.) on the slower mechanical hard drive. That advice works if you are using your PC for multimedia purposes. By contrast, game PCs require tons of large software installations that won't fit on a small SSD. I know some gamers, especially the train simulator community, who manually move game files back and forth between drives depending upon which one they are running that day. You should know about an alternative that does not require manual management of files: SSD caching. This intelligent caching algorithm is implemented *only* on motherboards containing the Intel Z68 chipset. The two drives then appear as a single C: drive to the Windows operating system. Write-to-disk performance is not improved because everything is ultimately written to the mechanical drive for permanent storage. But read-from-disk operations (like boot-up, starting apps, or loading new game levels) mostly runs at SSD speeds. Between the OS and the Z68 chipset, there's an intelligent algorithm that predicts which files you read-in most. Thanks to that intelligence, a virus scan that touches every file does not count toward the caching prediction. SSD caching is limited to 64GB of SSD, so larger disks do not help. Check Tom's Hardware again for benchmarks (which improves over time as usage behavior improves predictions) and for the reasons you don't realize full SSD speeds under Z68 SSD caching.

If you are considering a large SSD vs. a small SSD, go large. One obvious reason is the undeniable truth that you always fill up your hard drive eventually. But there is a reliability factor in this decision also. SSD technology can only re-write the bits a limited number of times. That limit is long enough not to affect most users for the typical life of a PC, and reaching that limit just means the disk can't write to that spot anye more - you don't lose data already written. But the time to reach that limit is shorter if you re-write sectors more often in your PC. That's the reason you *never* defragment an SSD. But it's also the reason why larger SSDs last longer, even if you never come close to filling it. An SSD's built-in controllers actually force new write operations into the next sequence of unused space, avoinding tmpy space that has been previously used. When write operations reach the end, it starts the sequence over (obviously not overwriting areas with data). Note in the previous two sentences that "unused" is different from "empty". This is an over-simplified summary of the algorithm, but they all aim to avoide re-writing the same section too many times. In a small disk, there is less empty space so it must be overwritten more frequently. In a large drive with vast empty space, it takes much longer before a once-used section needs to be used again.

If you are considering the Intel brand and the 520 Series specifically vs. other brands and models, definitely choose the Intel 520 Series. For performance reasons alons (more reasons to follow), any brand of SSD is a significant improvement. According to Tom's Hardware benchmarks, the improvement going from mecahnical drive to the slowest SSD is huge compared to the improvement between the slowest and fastest SSD. So why does it matter which SSD brand? Two reasons: performance *and* reliability. Intel - always - has offered the most reliability among all SSD brands. They include additional storage used transparently to ensure recover from erros (this 480GB drive actually contains 512GB internally). Also, Intel get first pick of the most reliable memory chips from the same foundry all the vendors use. Since SSDs first hit the consumer market, it's been a choice between Intel's reliability vs. other brands' speed. The 520 Series changed everything. Even though all SSDs are faster than their counterparts, you're paying that higher price-per-GB to get that performance. Among SSD brands, those with an internal SandForce controller always top the performance benchmarks. Intel's 520 Series is their first line to use the SandForce controller. Now, there is no SSD on the planet that can beat the Intel 520 Series in *either* performance or reliability. and nobody comes close when considering the combinatino of the two.

One final note: Don't implement RAID-0 or any form of RAID striping for your SSD. RAID is a performance technique by which you install multiple hard drives in an array and split the I/O load among them. This is still an excellent performance improvement for traditional mechanical drives, although the simple striping of RAID-0 makes every disk a failure risk that takes out all of the data stored. However, when impleemented for SSDs, RAID forces TRIM support to be turned off inside each drive. Readers can research the impoerant of SSD TRIM elsewhere. Just accept that TRIM was the technology answer that made the new generation of SSDs effective, fast, and reliable. When it comes to SSDs, performance hounds like me must go against our natural inclination toward defragmentation and RAID and simply accept the new drive in its purest form.

OK - another final note: Update the SSD's firmware *before* installing the OS. This is so importnat for any SSD regardless of brand or model. SSD vendors fix issues with firmware updates the same way software developers publish patches. But you can't flash your SSD firmware safely without risking the software and data installed there. You need to install your new SSD inside your PC and upgrade firmware before actually using it. Several web sites discuss how to perform this functinos, and it's not for the casual end-user. I recommend following instructions from your SSD vendor's site, but in general it involveds three steps. First, use another PC to find and download the latest firmware for your specific model SSD. Second, create a bootable CD containing that new firmware. Third, boot your new PC from that bootable CD and follow instructions. In my 3 latest PC builds, I have to change a motherboard setting about disk drive connection to allow the bootable disk's utility to perform the firmware installation. Again, just follow the SSD vendor's instructions.