Western Digital Caviar "Black" seems to have great performance, great warranty, and the price is usually just a tiny bit more than other drives with much shorter warranties. I'm personally waiting for the caviar black 2TB drives to get to a reasonable price, and then I'll buy a stack of them like I did with 500GB drives when they hit the bottom of the $/GB curve.
As for SSDs, Intel's latest SSD supports the "trim" command (must also be supported by the OS) which prevents the slowdown Skuzzy mentions. Anandtech did an article recently on the new SSD drives and the new trim command, which can be thought of as defrag for SSDs. In a nutshell, the claims are legit and the new drives won't suffer from the same problems as the older ones. For now though, I think only vista and win7 have the required OS support and the drives that have the feature are still very expensive.
I figure SSDs will hit true consumer pricing after win7 has been out for a year and hardware supported only by win7 becomes mainstream. Win7 is good enough that I think most of the computer geeks holding onto winXP will switch over reasonably soon, at least on their main computers. WinXP will probably survive as virtual machine images, dual boot options, and on secondary computers since you can't do a direct upgrade from XP to win7, but I think even the geeks will switch to win7 because it not only works, it will offer some compelling features and new hardware support that will be hard to ignore.
That doesn't mean the switch won't be one more support nightmare for people like skuzzy to deal with, but it is a good enough OS release to push hardware development in the same ways that every previous major version except for vista did. Vista couldn't even push DX10, but win7 will get people buying hardware to make the most of the new OS.
