My first SSD (low to mid range) failed within the first 3-6 months but the replacement has been going for almost 2 years now.
It may be worth it in the long run, but you have to keep that in mind when making the choice.
I'd only trust an Intel at this point, though even they're not much more reliable than a traditional hard drive on average (now that they've shipped a few buggy firmware revisions).
_Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?_
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well. In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
> Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
> Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
> Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
On the other hand, attempting to defragment an SSD is truly a bad idea, and pointless at that. Unless you are defragmenting free space, which does get important as the SSD fills with data.
[0] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-...
Yes it was a cheap SSD, but the difference between the high end and low end should be performance. Not "breaks vs !break". When that is true I'll buy another SSD.
That is not to say that SSDs are "bad", they are just not for me, yet. I like my computers to be low maintenance. I stopped fiddling with hardware for performance a few years ago.
Once you factor in the re-installs the latency of spinning rust looks a bit better.