I’ve been using SSDs for about two and half years now. Three of the four SSDs I have owned failed suddenly. That said, I could never see going back to a spinning platter drive in my MBP. The key is to have a solid backup strategy (which you really should be doing no matter what drive you use).
With the old 5400 rpm drive, boot time from entering a password to having a fully drawn desktop was well over a minute. Moving to a 7200 rpm drive shortened this somewhat. With the SSD it takes about 5 seconds. Application launches are instantaneous. It sounds cliche but it really is a transformative experience. I also had one on an XP machine and the performance boost was similar.
SSDs only have a limited number of erase cycles so performance will degrade as dead sectors are abandoned by the drive firmware. Enabling TRIM supposedly will greatly extend SSD life. There is no TRIM support for XP but it’s built into Windows 7. It’s also available on Macs starting with Snow Leopard, but it won’t enable itself with non-OEM drives. You will need to enable TRIM manually. Google “trim enabler mac” for more info.
