Hard drives are much more likely to fail without warning than SSDs. Modern SSDs use wear-leveling along with spare flash cells to increase reliability. To give

Hard drives are much more likely to fail without warning than SSDs. Modern SSDs use wear-leveling along with spare flash cells to increase reliability. To give one example: Intel warranties their X25-Ms for 3 years. They claim you can write 100GB/day for 3 years without exhausting the flash cells. The typical failure mode for a hard drive is for it to work fine and then completely die. No reading or writing, just dead. Flash cells usually become "stuck" after too many writes, turning an SSD into a read-only drive. Compared to hard drives, SSDs are much more tolerant of vibration and shock. I've had several hard drives fail, but no SSDs die on me. Most importantly, I cannot overstate the performance benefit. Any machine without an SSD feels broken to me. Considering how much time most of us spend on our computers, $300 amortized over the life of the SSD is completely worthwhile.