[lrosen]

Originally Posted by critter

Well, one other downside. They do lose performance over time due to multiple read/writes on the blocks. But the computer may die before it's bad enough to care.

No they don't really. They use wear leveling algorithms so all blocks get written to (as evenly as possible) the same number of times. They begin to wear bits out after a few million r/w cycles and performance may suffer some (and usually only in a busy enterprise server), but that would be years down the road. Even with the lost performance, modern SSD's will still run rings around a spinning disk.

As a single user system at home you will probably never notice any degradation.