HD or SSD on a Dell XPS 15?

Before I start shopping, I'm wondering if a 128G ssd will work well for photography work (CS5 / LR3).
I'm looking at a 2.7 ghz Intel i5, 1920 x 1080 screen, 1Gb Nvidia card, windows 7, and 8g ram.
I've hear good and bad about live expectancy of a ssd.?

Thanks for any advice

Your specs look good but that is just not a lot of hard drive space IMO. Pictures, especially RAW files, will fill that up pretty quick. The way around that is to keep an external drive as your real "storage space" of course. That's the work around computer makers are using more now-a-days to get the speed of SSD and the space of HDD; hybrids.

An SSD for OS and cache, as well as a HDD for bulk data storage, will be a good system that performs very well. I don't worry about the SSDs wearing out, they should last quite a while, when they fail I'll just buy another and install from backups.

Does that machine have USB 3.0 or eSATA? If so, you can store the bulk of your data on an external drive and access it at full speed.

Yeah, the only worry is that external drives are often slow, and SSD aren't big enough for photo storage. Make sure you have a fast connection and fast externals if you run that way. If not, I'd get a big internal drive.

SSD are very, very nice, but not essential. They mainly help launch speed and "snappiness" of a system but once all the programs are launched and loaded into RAM, the benefits are minimal.

My boot/os/apps are on the SSD. All user documents are on hard drives (which need to be backed up). Indeed hook up external drivers with the faster possible protocol...Thunderbolt for Mac or USB 3 for PCs. On my Hack I do USB 3 without problem.

As others have stated SSD should only be used for booting, cache and I load all of my programs on a 128GB SSD Drive. I have a 3TB internal drive for storage and I have a 3TB External drive for backing up. I usually keep the last 2 years on the computer then I back up the rest.