Well, $500 wasn't really necessary. The X-25M isn't really that great a drive anymore, tbh, and other manufacturers have made cheaper and much better performing drives. IMO the best balance atm is the OCZ Vertex 2. The 120GB version is $355 atm at Newegg, and gets:
Max Read: 285 MB/s
Max Write: 275MB/s
Sustained Write: 250MB/s
Crazy performance increase over the previous generation Vertex drives, and way better than the Intel drives.