I just purchased an Samsung 500GB solid state drive to put in my laptop. I've heard of stories of people who had failures w/ their SSDs. AFAIK you can disable the disc defragment schedule and run TRIM to prevent the possibility of SSD failure, and keep the firmware up-to-date. I'm gonna try and clone the drive. Is there anymore precautions I need to take?

None that I can think of. There were some other things you could do, but I have found most of them to not be worth my time. Especially if you are only going to run the SSD and not a SSD+mechanical hard drive.
If you are running an updated version of Windows 7 or 8, it should disable defrag automatically. Check to make sure. Trim also runs automatically.
Enable the write caching, if it's not already enabled. Device Manage->Disk Drives and right click on the Sammy and select policies tab.
I've been running the Sammy 500GB in my laptop since I bought it last August with no problems.

So the OS automatically adjusts the setting and enables TRIM huh?

omg, we're in the future :D

^ Yep! Soon HDDs will soon become obsolete. SSDs are the future!

It's as jjsimp says... I've had a Vertex 4 for well over a year now, Windows 7 automatically disabled Defragmentation for the SSD & TRIM runs automatically.

For the moment HDDs are still king of storage space, but hopefully V-Nand & ReRAM will see that change, it's yet to be seen if Crossbar's ReRAM will make it to the general populace but if it does then it'd be very exciting... The benefits all round compared to NAND, such as much lower power, much lower latency, much more endurance, better scalability & much more storage space could possibly see us with Tablets & Smartphones with hundreds of GB' of space. Considering it's touted to fit 1TB of storage in the size of a postage stamp then a SSD with this technology would be downright awesome to be fair.

Failing new technologies, then good old fashion time should bring us affordable yet sizeable SSDs. Win/Win I'd say.

Not sure about Linux, but WIndows 7 & 8 yes. XP, I do not believe has TRIM.

Just noticed, that once you install the Samsung SSD Magician software, there is an option to configure the other options that people talk about. You can run all the optimizations from the software, which helps a lot with setup.
I hadn't run it awhile and there was an update to v4.1 of the software available...which is a lot better than the one I used to set mine up.

As you might probably know. SSD's have a limited write times amount. After I installed my SSD I reinstalled windows 7 on the SSD but made sure that all folders that see regular change are now configured on my HD. All static information (that don't require writes) I keep on my SSD. Demanding games for instance are all on my SSD, but non-demanding games are on my HD.

I.e.:
Moved all user folders (including download folder) to my HD.
Moved swapfile to HD (if I had 16GB RAM I'd disable it all together, with 8gb I run into memory issues)
Disabled search indexing
Disable system restore (if you're confident at installing / reinstalling windows in case something breaks)

Samsung's SSD Magician software is a nice tool to do most of these things for you.
Good luck! I'm sure you will love your SSD drive as I do mine =)


--edit--
Hmm upon reading better I see you are probably going to run just the SSD.
This is fine, but then try and disable the frequently changing folders. See if you can run without swapfile (if you have enough memory), disable search indexing. I also disabled system restore.
--/edit--

I remember that from, oh, 20 years ago.

"Soon, tape drives will become obsolete! Internal HDDs are the future!"

It's hard to beat the information density of magnetics, and the lifespan's not even a contest. But, yeah, for disposable laptops and tablets of the near future? I'm sure you're spot on.

I certainly hope that doesn't happen before the price per gigabyte for SSDs comes crashing down. (Here the cheapest 500GB 2.5" SSDs cost around 350€, which I think is closer to $400; a 50% bigger 750GB 2.5" HDD costs 64€, 1 TB is about 80€ at the moment.)

On my main laptop, I have two 750GB hard drives (HDD). Their capacity is fine for now, but if anything, I'd like to swap them to bigger drives, not some laughable 120-300GB SSDs. I sometimes wondered why nowadays I hear so many people complain they are constantly running out of space on their C:-drive, until it occurred to me they must be using those freaking small SSDs.

Also, I don't quite get the idea of buying a small SSD (C: drive) only to keep Windows on it, and then a secondary bigger HDD to install all the humungous 15-20 gigabyte games and applications on it. Wasn't the point of installing the SSD exactly so that all those big games would load faster? How does it really help if their files are still on a separate, "slow", HDD?

Maybe for me the hybrid drives are the way to go...

Unless price is reduced and higher capacities are available, I don't see them hitting the consumer market, just like what happened with SCSI or RAMBUS.

Do note that both SCSI and RAMBUS only finally died (though they had had their death throes for a while) when IDE and DDR became as fast or faster (while still being cheaper).

Hybrid drives are not as fast as the SSD. It would probably be an upgrade for those that are still rocking a mechanical hard drive.
As for the space, I have a 500GB, which is half full. My GOG backups are on an external hard drive. I have probably ten GOG/steam games installed on the SSD, 4000 mp3s, and ten 1080p movies. Not sure how people use up all the space on a hard drive bigger than a 250GB. I even have a lot of stuff I could remove from my laptop to fit back on a 250GB SSD.
Even if I could install an additional mechanical hard drive on my laptop, I wouldn't.
The price is expensive for the 500GB, but the 256GB is a decent price...especially when you get it on sale. I wouldn't go back to mechanical hard drive.

Agreed, that should be quite enough, shouldn't it?

My 300 GB drive dedicated to (installed) games (and game saves) has about 7 GB of free space, my similarly-sized music drive is half full, as are the two 150 GB partitions for system+applications and user profiles, I have about 600 GB of video, my games-and-mods download folder is over 800 GB (700 for GOG alone). And then there's other stuff scattered around (virtual machines, old stuff I want to keep around, other downloads, ...), but that's quite minor in comparison.