Lots of Sci-Fi stories use Warp Drive. Do you?

For those who don't know what Warp Drive is:
Warp Drive warps space (surprise, surprise ) and allows you to travel at faster than light speeds. The main reason lots of people use it is so their characters can reach the stars, planets, etc.

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I don't think I want to use a warp drive in my stories just because it immediately makes me think of Star Wars or Star Trek and I want to do something new or at least different. For one of my scifi stories that I have yet to write, I thought about the use of warp gates built on the location of a wormhole. In the context of the story, spaceships would have navicomputers that use the warp gates to travel from point A to point B in space, but wormholes without warp gates could send travelers to random locations. I haven't seen the warp gate concept used in any scifi that I've read or seen but I'm sure there is something similar or identical out there.

The "warpgate" concept is a fascinating one. It's like airport terminals--you can go rapidly from one place to another, but the starting and ending points are fixed and limited. You can't fly from your house to a certain shop in Chicago, but you can drive to the airport in Milwaukee and fly to an airport in Chicago. It's a much more realistic way of travel, as opposed to being able to warp just anywhere from anywhere. Puts a good workable set of limitations on travel--and also creates for a lot of interesting plot potential, as all traffic as to be routed through certain points. More potential for people to cross paths, as opposed to people just wandering around open space. And it also raises the possibility of trade cities built around gates, and military powers controlling gates, etc...

There are three ways to travel faster than the speed of light: warp drive, hyperdrive and...I forget the third. I think the third is you just wave your hands and drive faster. A hyperdrive operates on the principle that you can jump out of this diimension into hyperspace, and just bypass all that annoying space before jumping back in in the blink of an eye. And a warp drive twists or folds the fabric of space-time so you can get from point A to point B without having to travel very far. I think. That's why it's called a warp drive: it warps space. In Star Trek, really, the warp drive just drives faster, but there are much more complicated breakdowns and theories based on Einstein's concept of space-time.

Interesting this topic is most recent, because I just found this article last night and wanted to talk about it.

http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive

Apparently last year this guy--Harold White--started experimenting and discovered what is basically "making light move faster so you don't have to break Einstein's law of relativity". At least, that's how some people are describing it. It's certainly not a new concept but this Harold White guy at NASA has made some new discoveries about it and may have found a way to fuel a warp drive with only about sixteen hundred pounds of fuel (they didn't specify how far that could last the Warp Drive).

So, science-y people. Tell me what you think of this. Is this new breakthrough really as groundbreaking as they say it is, from what you can tell?

I have read about this. It certainly seems legit.

Seriously, though, the theoretical science there is sound (I can't speak for the math, I'm better at raw theory than mathematical anything- but I've read some much more in-depth articles than this sound byte). As a few comments mention, though, the need for an exotic material with a negative mass kind of puts a kaibosh on any concrete developments. At least until the design gets tweaked to dodge that little (gaping) pothole.