I just bought 2 SSD's about a month ago. I got a 64gb OCZ Core series and a 32GB Patriot.
Overall, I'm disappointed, but I've learned a lot.
I use the 32gb to hold my squid cache on my caching proxy. It's seek times are near instant, so it does this well and makes web surfing faster. No real complaints here.
The OCZ 64gb is used as my system drive on my new phenom quad core. The problem is that it freezes up totally sometimes for 30s+ at a time when it's doing writes. It made any kind of multitasking impossible (which is obviously not what I had in mind if I bought a quad core...) I rma'd it and got another, but the problem persists and is a limitation of the technology.
There are definitely things you can do to tweak it and improve performance. The single most critical thing is to change your IO scheduler. This has to do with how processes are granted access to the disk. Unfortunately, this functionality is not available in Windows. In Linux, change to noop. (Linux 2.4 kernels don't have this, you need 2.6+).
Next thing to do is get rid of the swap or paging file (depending on your OS it's called different things). In Linux, it's simple to just not use a swap partition, but this is a slight problem if you don't have enough ram. Luckily, ram is dirt cheap now and my 4gb is plenty to not need a swap. Windows keeps creating a paging file even if you shut it off, even if you have enough RAM. I think there is a way to fix this with registry hacks, but I haven't figured it out. Another option is to simply locate the swap or paging file on another drive (a magnetic drive).
In Linux, I mounted /tmp using the tmpfs (dynamically sized ramdisk). This way it doesn't use the disk for temp files, but the ram. Again... you need ram to do this. I put /var/tmp on a magnetic disk because it's too big to move into ram (it can easily hit 10gb on my system because I use ccache, and I need it to be persistent).
Turn off caching to disk in your browser or move the cache to a magnetic drive. These small writes are what tie up the system.
Basically, your goal is not minimize writes to the disk. Reads are fast, and boot up is very fast. Sequential writes are ok, but if you overwrite another file, it's very slow because of how it has to erase an entire block before writing to it again. Seek time is near 0, so for reading from a cache, they are extremely fast and so I'm happy with the performance in my caching proxy, but not as my system drive.
There is also a very important distinction to make between SLC and MLC drives. MLC are what I have... they are cheaper by far. SLC run about $750 for a 32gb drive if you get a good deal. MLC are a fraction of that. SLC do not have the same limitations as MLC's.
Overall, I wouldn't buy them now... I think the tech is immature and too pricey. Performance is simply not that great yet. They ARE very, very energy efficient, cool, resistant to physical shock (eg. dropping), and small.
I just picked up a netbook with a ssd. I'll let you know how that goes... I didn't really have a choice though, it doesn't take a regular sized magnetic drive, only a mini pci-e drive on a card. It will be good for battery life though.
