check your warrenty again most drives come with a 3 year or 5 year warrenty standard

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!!

Hello, just a word of warning with SSD - I am a system administrator and we used the OCZ Vertex SSDs in a raid array for an I/O intensive RRD database (basically constant reads and writes across all the data). The disks failed after 3 months of use, becoming unusable for writing. We replaced them with Intel SLC SSD disks, and they are happily running since then.

With SSD, it's important to understand that each memory cell in the disk have a limited number of writes before it becomes unwritable and useless. The firmware of the disk makes sure that this wear and tear is distributed evenly across all the cells, extending the lifespan of your disks, but still, the life expectancy of your disks depend on how much you write on them. Typical gamer/desktop user who mostly boots up apps (reading) and writes only minimally should have little problems. 

However it's important to keep in mind to limit writes as much as possible - switch off automatic defragmentation, move swapfiles and such on classic discs if you have them, and so on. The gap between MLC and SLC disks is huge, but so is the price diffetence. I have read that newer MLC disks are actually worse because of miniaturization, lowering the write limit per cell even lower. 

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?

Which Vertex are you referring to? 1 or 2.. U've had my 2 for 5 months with nary an issue and i use my laptop 14hrs/pay and its on 24/7 not had a single hiccup with it.. granted if your looking for extra performance you might want to look at the Max IOPs version which is a tad more for faster 4k speeds.. but I personally havent had an issue and I run one in my laptop, my brother runs one on his desktop and i wacked a 60gb one in my mums laptop. No issues as of yet.

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

Welcome to the world of awesome.  You'll never go back to mechanical hdd's again.

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.

its pretty simple.. use ssd for you boot drive and programs.. hdd for large data and server for storage of movies/games/apps/music

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.

How long is a piece of string?

All things being equal any hardware will snuff it when it's time is up.

If you're lucky and you always manage to be that average person who, with average use gets an average life out of it...then there's no difference or reason to even care.

As with all things computer...by the time it's time is up the replacement will be half the size...half the price...and twice as fast/good/desirable.

Don't fret the little things.

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.

My little 60 gig SSD has been on 24/7 for getting on for 2 years .... never missed a beat.  The 2x1TB and 2x500G platters likewise.

All of the above are now just about half the price for twice the size.

Increased price isn't the concern...either way you 'should' be looking at 2 drives.... one for OS....one for data/backup.

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.

NOTE : your hard disk Power On Hours Countattribute current value (83) is below the normal range (98 - 100) 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.