The need for speed is always of great concern but reliability is of greater concern. I know in the past from reading more reviews than I care to count that SSD's have a higher than desirable failure rate or I should say that's the impression I get. I recall one person indicating the speed is so great that they actually buy 2 of them antisipating a failure and keep the 2nd one so that if a failure occurs they can quickly install it while they are awaiting replacemet of the original and so forth. This does not afford me any comfort so I continue to shy away from them.

However as I sit on the sidelines itching to try one out and reluctent to because of the preceived failure rates I have to ask those who actually use them if SSD technology has become stable and if so who has the best drives out there today? Also what application are you using them in a Server or Client and which OS?

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Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

We have 2 Thinkpad t420s's that come with factory SSDs and W7 Pro. One a Samsung 470 128gb and the other a Micron C300 128gb SSD. One is coming up on a year old and the other about 6 months old, both have worked without issue. I would expect them to work without issue, otherwise I would question why Lenovo put them in my laptop.

I have a few friends with various Macs that came with factory SSDs and they too have had zero issues over the last year or so. Again, I expect a factory installed hard drive whether mechanical or SSD to be reliable. Maybe I am naive.

Now, I am an avid Slickdeals/fatwallet user and can't help but be overwhelmed with complaints about SSDs. It's pretty clear most SSD brands have terrible reputations on Newegg/Amazon. What that means I'm not sure. My guess would be a range of things, bad/poorly written firmware, old hardware not completely compatible with the newer technology, user installation error, cloning your drive vs fresh install......all sorts of things. Or maybe factory installed SSDs on factory tested machines for compatibility makes the difference.

All I can say for sure is, neither of our Thinkpads have had a single issue with our SSDs. It takes 10 seconds to reboot and about 8 to boot up from cold. I'm telling you, once you put an SSD in your computer, you will swear you can't go back. To me it's been a huge upgrade, like SD to HD TV. Even considering going back to a mechanical drive in my laptops is out of the question.

I initially was concerned about the longevity of our SSDs but after running SSDlife on the drives, my fears dissipated. Mine, the Samsung says it will die in 8 years, 4 months, 18 days. The Micron does not provide its end of life info.

Since our WHS2011 backups up our SSDs nightly, I really don't have to worry about being without my computer for long if the drive does fail. For now, the Thinkpads are under their 3 year warranty. When the ends, Best Buy (if still around), microcenter.... I can always get a drive the same day if needed.

I myself just built a desktop with the same motherboard but a AMD fx 8120 cpu using a ssd 120gb drive. June 2012
All I can say is wow!
I am using windows 7 which supports TRIM and garbage collection by default.
I am having a issue with my old wireless mouse not being responsive.
So I probably will buy a new mouse.

I've had two SSD's running in a RAID0 striped array for a couple years now, no issues at all.

Edit: At work all the developers have SSDs in their workstations, and we're using SSD RAID arrays for fast primary storage of our production SQL server.

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
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I have 4 working right now. All in client pc's.
First was an intel 256gig when win 7 just came out. No problems so far, used daily for email doc's home office stuff.
Second was an OZC vertex 3 128gig for my win7 gaming rig fast as heck, no problems so far 8-10 months.
Third is a ozc vertex 4 128 gig for a HP qi618 all in one touchsmart with vista 64 bit, it works awesome, I cloned it then had to align it. My daughter has everything running and I have MSSE and Malwarebytes running all the time and it is still fast.
Lasty is a ozc agility 60 gig in my win xp netbook, It has made the netbook usable, it was so slow before.

I like the ozc stuff, the vertex are the fastest of all so far for me. I will be replacing my main home pc with another vertex 4 and am planing on seeking one into my work PC.

How long will the last, don't know, I really don't believe the ssdlife app, it is a guess algorithm at best (I have read) You know from my posts that I keep base clones of all my clients so I really don't care at this point when one goes.
But, I am not ready to put them in the server/nas yet. To small and the unknown for that much data, not me, WD reds for the server.

I will put ssds in all my client pc's, love the speed and the prices are getting better for the smaller sizes, but we keep all are data on the server so all we need is the smaller ones.

Lastly, I am getting ready to build a new Ripper box (i have the scanner attached to it as well) and it will be running a ozc vertex 4 512 ssd with win7 64 bit and a lot of ram.

Edit: To respond to your question, Stable yet.
I was worried at first because you hear that xp and vista are not ssd aware and they will not use them correctly, I thought They might die fast or do something bad. I had also heard that some motherboards would not see them as a harddrive, don't know where that came from as I have had no problems that way.
That is why the first one went into one of my clients new win7 pc, I let him test it out for me.
Then prices got down and I just couldn't let the potential speed go untested.
Stable working in xp / vista / win7 for me, but stable for 3-5 years, we just don't know yet.
But with the server to hold all the data, they are just os drives anyway. For me ssd gives me back what the virus and malware scanners took away. Plus a little

Goodluck, but be ready to be hooked on the speed.

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EX470 5-3-08 CPU/RAM/BIOS/New Power Supply-For sale!
X510 3-15-11 CPU/RAM -Active.
X710 2-15-13 DIY Test 2012E.
X510 3-20-13 CPU.
X510 4-25-13 from parts.
EX490 5-12-13 used.

My company laptop has one. Over a year old and zero issues. I added one to my Dell XPS One about a year ago and have encountered no issues. The one at home is a Corsair 120GB Force 3. I'm not sure what brand the one at work is.

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HP MSS EX490, Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300, 1TB System drive, 6TB Storage pool managed by StableBit DrivePool

Recently I purchased 3 SSD's, 240GB OCZ Vertex 4 for my primary desktop, 120 GB OCZ Vertex 4 for a Win8 Desktop and a 180GB Intel 330 Series for my Highlander Server which runs WHS2011.

The OCZ's were a pure joy to install but the Intel was a PITA mostly because of issues with the WHS2011 OS backups, long story there but in the end I am happy with all 3 installs. One improvement I noticed was I gained the ability to stream Blu-Rays online and this week I installed Intel CT NIC's on 2 clients and Teamed 2 of them in Highlander which added an additional performance boost.

Now I its just a matter of observing everything and hoping the SSD's will not crap out so that when I build my next server I will be able to incorporate them into the server along with full hardware RAID next year once I come to terms with the proper drives to use which will either be WD RE, WD RED or Seagate Constellation Drives in that pecking order.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8