Yes reliable. Especially Intel or something like Crucial M4.

Avoid Sandforce controllers. i.e. OCZ SSD's

Sorry to disagree, but I love OCZ drives I have vertex 2 and 3 in several computers. I've tried other flavors but not IBM, which I hear good things about.

They are fast, you will them.

M

OZC with the Sandforce controller have had all sorts of problems. Perhaps they've fixed it, perhaps not. But there are many, many people who have had them and avoid them at all costs. Do a little searching. Here's one source:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4973/sandforce-identifies-firmware-bug-causing-bsod-issue-fix-available-today

"You need to back it up nightly just like every other boot drive"

Why back up nightly?

All your data is on real drives, isn't it? In that case, you only need to backup your boot drive after you have installed or uninstalled something.

ssd drives are the way to go for fast thru-put..... but a lot of ssd's can suffer write speeds issues, but then some new ssd's are now using smart large cache to balance writing/reading speed issues.

Tom's Hardware site, one of many pc sites around, has a review of some the new ssd's, check it out. On a side note, ssd's are taking over big server farms and supercomputing systems.

I have a solid state operations "C" drive
No toubles so far.
It's been three months or so.

I use a 60Gb SSD internally as a scratch drive when I need speed.

Another PC here has a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 which uses the Intel Hybrid EFI technology. I don't have an SSD on that machine yet, but it is supposed to deliver the best of both HDD and SSD.

I have had the Patriot 128 GB SSD for the last 2 years--works great. I had an error once, but it never happened again after I re-booted. One thing--make sure you find all the unique settings to use once you setup Windows. For example, you do not want to optimize an SSD drive and there are a LOT of other tweeks. I found a youtube video that walked me through ALL of the tweeks and unique settings when I first set it up. I only run my programs on it but re-setup all my document folders to another drive (so there would be plenty of space).

Also, avoid writing and erasing (i.e., copying files to your desktop--use another drive), since it will start to slow the drive down a lot later. Mine is slower than origionally (but still faster than my black caviar drives) so I have to run the utility on it (but I need to backup the entire drive before hand).

PeterDuke,

Yep, I keep my data on a separate drive but there are plenty of files written to your system drive even without installing/uninstalling any programs. Can you restore an older backup without much consequence, usually yes.

But, I like to know I have an exact snapshot of my system drive every night. A differential backup takes about 20-40 seconds on my system.

So, for about 30 seconds a night, I know I can restore to exactly the same state.

We're using the 60GB Vertex 2 SSDs as boot drives for all of our workstations and the only drive in all of our laptops. (60GB keeps people from loading their own junk on the laptop - hah!) Haven't had any problems in over 1.5 years. IMO the best feature besides fast boot times is how fast we can backup the drive.

I've used SSDs for several years now as boot disks - probably the best single upgrade I've ever done.

Reliable? Not in my experience. My Dane-elec (rebranded first generation Intel SSD) died after a year or so, and had no warranty. I never knew why it died.

My original Intel X25 80 gig second generation SSD died when a nearby lightning strike fried it. My computer was being powered by a UPS that provided 100% battery power, so nothing else in the computer died - leading me to believe that it was the intense electromagnetic field that killed the SSD, not a power line surge.

Intel replaced the fried SSD in just a few days, no questions asked. So be sure to get a brand that has a good warranty.

Speed? Almost zero seek time means really fast boot up and same for opening programs. Much better than any spinning disk that I have had, especially after lots of programs are installed in the OS.

Read speed on the Intel (this one is over a year old, and 90% full - I need to do a disk clean up) also is pretty good. I just checked mine with ATTO Disk Benchmark, looking at 8 different file sizes that range from 64 KB to 8192 KB. Read speed was only 140,029 MB/sec. for the 64-KB file size; but all of the others exceeded 260,000 MB/sec. My fastest 7200 rpm disk, less than half full, is not even half as fast.

Write speeds are just so-so, ranging from 51,501 up to 88,301 - not as fast as my 5400 Samsung 2tb drive.