>I can answer part of the question. There are two problems. First is the quality of the controller chip on the SSD - one way of making SSD's cheaply (or cheapER) is to use a low grade or poor grade of controller chip. So most likely, if you buy a relatively cheap SSD, it's because the controller chip is s%itty. Secondly, after the first read/write and wipe of a byte, the SSD slowly begins to deteriorate...I have heard all kinds of words about this, saying that the life of an SSD is PROJECTED to be about 5 years, but the fact is, none of them have existed for 5 years and so there is no history on them like on the mechanical drives. But its a well known fact on NAND technology, that the memory deteriorates over time which does not happen on a mechancial drive.
And one other thing, NAND memory is the same thing that you have on thumb drives, camera memory, etc - which, if you have had any experience with those, you know, it suddenly just bellies up and dies! So I have a gut suspicion that a couple of two or three years from now, we are going to see a whole slew of people screaming they have lost everything on their SSD drive. Unlike a mechanical drive platter where forensic software can retrieve a large portion of the lost data on a bad drive, when something on NAND memory goes, it dies a total death - I mean TOTAL. There is no way of EVER getting the data back off it - gone forever!

So what I wanted to do here was to caution you to think twice about SSD - at least for now. If you just HAVE to have it, don't buy the cheapest one because sooner than later, it will fail and you won't get the performance out of it you think you are going to get. Make sure you understand the TRIM command. SSD without TRIM makes SSD slower than a snail - so learn the TRIM command. And if I were you I would invest in an external USB mechanical backup disk and backup everything to it in case the SSD suddenly dies.

PS - the only real advantage to an SSD is in cutting down on bootup time and launching programs. The fact is that a 7200 RPM 32 Meg Cached mechanical drive has about a 7.5 millisecond access time while the equivalent SSD has an access time of about 0.5 milliseconds. The problem you see is that the human BRAIN cannot perceive a time span less than about 10 milliseconds, so really, your brain is not going to know the difference ellapsed between a mechanical and an SSD drive.

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