The new vertex 3's are twice as fast if you have sata 3 ports!!

But that being said i have a 120gb vertex 2 on my laptop and the speed boost is very noticeable.. after a while it seems normal but then go back to using a hdd and notice a big difference!!

What Kamamura_CZ says is what everyone says, beware the read/write limits. I want a comparison of that statement to a disk drive. Will an SDD last longer, or shorter, given how I use the drive? What are the facts? Let's say I write 400gb data every day. Or 40gb. Or 15gb. When will the drive die?

First, AFAIK, there is no read limit. There is however a write limit - and lower in case of MLC disks than in case of SLC. I don't know the exact numbers, but I did the estimates and real performance comparison for our server (it's a year back), and I found out that the life expectancy for the OCZ Vertex MLC disks was overstated four times (approx) by the manufacturer, compared to real life expectancy we expected on the production servers.

Once again I repeat that it was a server that wrote constantly across the whole disk.

Generally speaking, in a typical home user environment, you read much more often than you write, so you should be problably okay. Larger disks also last longer, because  the wear-and-tear balancer in the firmware will spread the writes across more cells. It's also helpful to make sure you have TRIM working, and also garbage collector, if your disk supports them.

Some useful tips:

1: Verify that TRIM is enabled as in the prior messages.
2: Make sure your AHCI controller is using a TRIM compliant driver as in the prior messages.
3: Make sure the defrag program is disabled for the SSD... Admin tools/Services set Disk Defragmenter to disabled. I use auslogics disk defrag (free) for my other drives manually. U almost never have to defrag an SSD. It can lower its life expectancy.
4: Page File. There has been much debate about this. The idea that no one needs a page file is a bunch of crap. I have tried it both ways, moitoring writes and reads, and YES, it IS used even with 8 Gigs of RAM. I left mine at 2 Gigs, but it is just fine at 1 Gig. Writes to the page file are sequential now. Page file is also read at boot time to speed things. Keep it on your SSD where it belongs.
5: Superfetch/prefetch/bootfetch: Windows 7 does not always turn it all off as it should. The purpose of these things are to pre-load the programs you load from slow hard drive to fast memory (cache) in case you want to run them. With your SSD, there is no need. We will disable them and free up some memory and resources and stop a LOT of writes to the SSD.
To disable Superfetch, etc: Admin tools/Services. Select superfetch and set to disabled.
Run regedit and change the following values: HKLM/System/CurrentControlset/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management/Prefetch Parameters and change the key valus of Enableboottrace, enableprefetcher, enablesuperfetch all to 0 and exit regedit.

Source:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/70822-ssd-tweaks-optimizations-windows-7-a.html

That's an overstatement. SSDs have their disadvantages - high price per unit of storage space, and said limited life expectancy. Using SSD for everything is mostly colossal waste of money.

hopefully, you won't have any issues with that ocz drive. odds are you won't. their method of tech support is horrible. i switched to a corsair ssd just for that reason.

on a side note, i hope corsair releases that force 3 series soon.

I think it's a fair question, considering the increased price. I don't want to pick up something that lasts half the time a disk drive would. But if you want to deal in averages, I'd be happy to get some averages for the "average" sdd time until fail.

NOTE : your hard disk Power On Hours Countattribute current value (97) is below the normal range (98 - 99) reported for your specific hard disk model. Basically your hard disk was powered on for more than the maximum time the average user did. This means that either all of the reports collected are from hard disks that were not powered on for too long (this is realistic for recent models) or that your hard disk is becoming old. Usually this is not considered as a pre-failure advisory, but you should check whether you want to replace the hardware or keep an eye on its performances over time.

That little 60gb ssd, did you use that for OS?

Based on your article title. Just how many drive fails have you had? I've had a couple myself, lost 500GBs worth of video and audio. Luckily I had backups of my audio files at least. The video part took time to get again but I eventually got most of it back.

I would love to get an ssd for my OS and games but too expensive for now. I did get a WD raptor for the speed and it does work wonders. To small size though.

Thanks, although anecdotal that kind of evidence about the durability is just what I wanted. People talk back and forth about it so much I don't know which way is which.

Not an overstatement at all.  But maybe I should have clarified.  My statement should be in context of the main hdd for the OS.

OUCH!  I hope it was not a shocking experience for you!

Generally true.  I keep them until they die, but after a few years, they become secondary drives that just stores backup stuff.  So if they do fail, no harm no foul (unless the primary fails as the same time).