Are SSD's really reliable enough for power users?

An Intel presentation we saw said that the SLC based SSD drives were recommended for heavy database and file usage. They are much, much more expensive, and designed for things like SANs... We use SQL express pretty heavily as well, on most of our laptops, and went with the MLC based ones.

We went with the X-25m's in about 4,000 laptops. We have had a few issues, some fixed by a firmware update.. others that were just bad drives.. but really, we are looking at about 1%-2% higher error rate than what we saw with the standard 7200rpm laptop drives. When you figure in the power, weight, and especially speed savings (we went from a 10 minute boot with XP and 7200rpm laptop drives because of all sorts of drivers and software and AV, to a 2 min boot with Win7 and an SSD) we would still choose the SSD's every day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

We had all sorts of HD's die for all sorts of reasons.. (when you have that many laptops, a 2% error rate means about 80 drives per year!) A good backup is critical, no matter what drive technology you use..

Yes, we have plenty of users using SSDs, and there is no single problem. We had multiple failures with disk controllers (most probably not related to SSDs) and few broken HDDs but no single problem with SSDs.

Of course this is not comprehensive study with statistical significance, but I can't see why not. We are even using SSD (Intel X25-M 40GB) for search index (updated continuously) and for swap files without problems.

Yes. One year of abuse here and still going strong. I say bad luck.

Edit: The Intel SSD X-25 S.M.A.R.T. tool indicates I have 6.2TB of host writes so far in 12 months. A number I believe will be more than the average user, given I don't refrain on using it to speed up various activities.