I'm an overly cautious person when it comes to data so I'm still holding off - these results look promising enough to throw some of that caution to the wind.
I've never heard of an HDD that presented a reliable, linear prediction of their own death years in advance, which is how these SSDs behave. HDDs usually fail suddenly and completely, following the well-known bathtub curve lifetime distribution. There was a paper from one of the big cloud shops about how SMART lacks predictive value for HDD failure.
Compared to HDD, SSD failure modes are highly desirable and easy to handle.
I've had a 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 for almost 2 years. Depending on the OS used, you should be able to automatically put more valuable fast-changing user specific data on a HDD, while keeping your system and apps on a SSD. I did that for Windows 7, and everything has been great.
I'd be interested to know the best way to set that up. My next Windows PC will have an SSD for the system drive and a regular harddrive for other storage. I figure I can use junction points to map certain folders to the HD but I'm not sure what would be a good configuration.
I did that with my first SSD system, mapped C:/Users to an separate HDD. Honestly it was more trouble than it was worth.
Using a junction point for a critical folder like that requires booting into a recovery mode and entering a bunch of incantations into a cmd window. And things will go sideways if you have to remove the Users drive at any point.
An easier course of action is to just use the Libraries functionality under windows and map each of those to write by default into your HDD. so most of my documents reside in D:\media\Documents instead of C:\Users\[blah]\Documents. Then you can also leverage the SSD speed for stuff in your AppData.
If you use Windows 8, I've heard that doing something like this causes massive problems when updating Windows itself. It's been fine for Windows 7 though.
Correct. I did this exact thing (used a junction point for my User directory) and could not upgrade from 8 to 8.1. Moved it back to "normal" and it went fine. This is a known "issue", so don't do junction points, just do the traditional "Move This Folder" for each special folder (Documents, Downloads, etc.)
If you're going to spend the extra money for an SSD, your valuable fast-changing data is exactly what you should put on the SSD. Buying an SSD and then not taking advantage of it is totally irrational.
I'm an overly cautious person when it comes to data so I'm still holding off - these results look promising enough to throw some of that caution to the wind.