SSD and OS X

Question

Now that solid state drives are becoming more affordable I wondered if OS X would install sweetly.
See, for example,
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/11/09/reviewstorage_kingston_ssd_now_v40gb/

Answer 1

Not a direct answer to your query, but consider that SSD's based on NAND Flash memory technology will eventually become unreliable because NAND flash memory cells are only good for a finite number of write cycles -- they literally wear out. The standard way of dealing with this is through wear leveling features that try to distribute writes to different memory cells evenly enough that heavily used cells don't wear out prematurely, & by providing a lot of extra cells that are similar in function to spare sectors on conventional hard drives. (For more about this, see for example this Kingston FAQ.)
The point is this cell wear phenomenon makes these SSD's less suitable as general purpose startup drives than you might think because caches & other file system items like file metadata are so frequently updated. Basically, you are trading off lower useful lifespan for SSD's other attributes: low power consumption & (usually) faster access times than with conventional drives. This makes sense for some startup drive applications, like for long battery life in lightweight laptops (like the MacBook Air), but not so much for others, like general purpose desktop systems.
FWIW, Kingston claims a useful lifespan of 3 to 5 years for their SSD's, depending on the usage scenario, but it isn't clear that these scenarios would apply to one used as a Mac OS X startup drive, so you might get less.