Yes - the computer I use here is the culmination of hoping someone I was building servers for would actually want to pay the extra couple hundred dollars for a SSD+1TB backup combination, which never happened. At one point I was selling servers like hotcakes, and picked up some SSDs. The good ones from Intel and Crucial will last longer. I think the cheap ones will fail quicker. My point in illustrating the RAID-0 is that no one in their right mind would do that with standard drives. RAID-0 is performance RAID, and if one drive goes, so does the whole bowl of jelly. In this case, read and writes are so precise that the same array has existed, without failure, for well over a year after constant, heavy use. No sign of performance degradation. One disadvantage of performance RAID is that it writes to all of the drives simultaneously, and they are constantly spinning (or in the SSDs case - not moving). Here you can see the example of having a hundred SSDs vs. a hundred standard drives. If an SSD is going to fail as DOA, you're going to know pretty soon. A standard drive can go a month after... sometimes a year. No way to know. But if you think of 100 HDDs just spinning vs. 100 SSDs just sitting there, you start to realize where that advantage is.
Crucial SSDs, last time I checked, were coming with a 3 to 5 year manufacturers warranty on their SSDs. After 3-5 years, I would still expect a standard HD to become reliable. Like regular drives, SSDs are also S.M.A.R.T compatible, and can give out readouts and warnings if they are starting to fail.
I really do believe you're paying a high premium because of the performance and reliability. Perhaps more for the performance right now, but the reliability is a big factor. Intel is shipping industrial quality SSDs on servers right now. They are very expensive for the cost because they're top notch in the quality arena. When dealing with SSDs and flash memory sticks, I have had 2 PATRIOT 64GB USB flash memory dongles in constant use that have outlived many a regular old hard drive over the last 4 years.
I just see the reality in the idea that people see a big price and they come out and say "it's not worth it". But having worked with these devices and experienced them firsthand, I know they are very reliable and very good. "Spinning disks will last 5 years or more." if lucky. Anything can disrupt this. The power dying or being cut abruptly can damage a conventional drive. I believe wear and tear with conventional drives is worse at this point. The fact is, its like having a car without wheels that just hovers above the ground. Sure, the hover mechanism could break down, but you're probably much more likely to get a flat. It is the next, logical move in storage. It is an applied concept that has been around for a very long time. Not to mention, for the workstation RAID I am talking about SSDs connecting into the SATA ports themselves. The high end SSDs are being built on PCI-E x16 slots to increase throughput.
I think you will see even better performance and reliability when file systems come out that are no longer designed solely for magnetic disks. The whole idea that you have a drive screaming and rotating as fast as possible to keep working has always been the Achilles heel of a great system. The bottleneck and the one component that was always in an unsure, unready state and required maintenance.
As someone that has seen heavily used IDE drives in business use for 8+ years, their performance is a nightmare anyway.. I have seen disk drives in use in a business env. not defragged for over 8 years where Windows XP would take 15+ minutes to boot. Out of 200 computers in an enterprise environment, the primary failure for nearly every system other than PSU failure was the hard drive. It was the hard drive at least 80% of the time. In 5 years, you won't want to be using that drive, and I really think SSDs show promise right now for businesses especially, and consumers, very soon. The problem with pre-shipped consumer SSDs could become apparent if companies like Dell an HP decide to go down the cheap-o route like they usually do with their hardware (sorry just my opinion). Under these conditions you can expect to get a trashy SSD that's extremely low-end. This has the potential to be a sour taste in consumers' stomach. It was done on the Dell Mini 9 whereas they used a terrible SSD that was easily replaceable with a markedly faster Runcore 64GB SSD chip sold almost exclusively from a company in Ireland. It made the Mini 9 running a SSD about 4-5x faster. I could go on... things have improved though, drastically, since they first started coming out. The ones that shipped with pre-built systems from major manufacturers last year are almost implied to have been a washout for so long as those companies build systems with cheap parts. System builders will know where to look for the quality drives that can outperform conventional ones.