I got my samsung 830 128gb's for $89 each last year. Fast harddrives that have good sustained tranfer rates are almost that much and wind up being much slower.
You'll definitely want at minimum a dual drive setup so you're not reading and writting to the same drive at the same time.
but yeah, we'll have to cut some corners to make budget. Too bad 64gb ssd's went back up in price too. I think we might have to wait a month or so for them to come down again for tax return season. LOL