>
>The performance gains with SSD are large. A typical mechanical drive might peak between 70-100M bytes/sec in the best-case scenario, often much lower. As mentioned above a typical SSD will reach 300M bytes/sec on SATA II and up to 500M bytes/sec on SATA III.
>

I bought two Samsung SSD drives back in the summer of 2013 and they are still zipping along fine.

Dmitry, assuming there are no compatibility issues, I strongly recommend the Samsung Pro SSD drives. Yes, you'll pay a few more dollars than other SSD drives, but they are very high quality and perform extremely well.

As for an SSD drive dying out, I've had standard laptop drives inside of 3 years. Regardless, I back up all my apps and documents and important stuff to multiple thumb drives (and my FTP server).

Believe me, once you've spent a week using an SSD drive, you will NOT want to go back. I used to think that a 7200 rpm drive was a big difference over a 5400 rpm drive. And then I got an SSD drive for my laptop, and was blown away.