solid state worth the price?

the difference comes from what you would do with it. if you know that all your main programs can be stored on 120 GBs then a SSD is definately better but if you store movies, pictures and music then an HDD is better. I use a 256GB OCZ vertex 4 SSD and I love it. everything is amazingly fast. since I knew that I wouldn't need much room I decided that the SSD was a better option.

on top of that, large capacity drives are very cheap (i'd stay away from 3 TB drives as windows has issues with very high capacity drives) this means that you can get an external drive to hold your movies and media that is also extra portable in case you want to share files.

my preference goes to the SSD just because of how fast they make your computer. space is cheap, speed is not, by having the speed option in your computer you can upgrade space easily. having everything installed on a slow but large drive makes an upgrade for speed much more difficult.

Edit 01: while it is true that SSDs have a limited number of write cycles, they last years under regular use a 256 GB ssd will last between 5-7 years which at that point you can get a new computer all-together. on top of that, an SSD will be a lot more reliable that an HDD as there are no moving parts making it more resilient to shocks like drops and hits. they also generate less heat keeping you computer cool letting it run faster. the amount of things ready to kill a HDD make it just as long living as an SSD.

Edit 02: I forgot to mention that for regular use a solid state drive is the very best performance increase that you can add to a computer. not even a new processor on a tower computer has such a large effect, a sold state allows processors to work at their true potential and not be slowed by slow data. on a laptop this is even more the case because of the extra limited upgradeability only possible on RAM. (on a laptop, buying a solid state for it gives you a regular hard drive to use as an external when you replace the original making your full setup even faster and cheaper, all you would need is a hard drive enclosure)

Depends for what. Large movies, Database servers, anything to do with large files (not an OS) HDD Would be a better choice. For an OS, or programs that you run frequently, SSD is better.

NO. ONCE AN SSD FAILS YOUR DATA IS HISTORY; NO CHANCE OF RECOVERY

HDD ALL THE WAY. WESTERN DIGITAL ONLY