I have to say that the Intel X25-V I recieved is supurb for 24/7. These can be had for $110...
I get boot times around 18 seconds (I type in a password)...(I had about 30 in shortstroked RAID 0)

40GB is actually plenty for the OS and a few programs/games. A clean install will take up 9.5-10GB.

As for the sucky write performance even installing programs is not sluggish and writing is what my "data" disks are for...1.2TB of RAID 0 storage @ 210 MB/s.