Given the massive increase in productivity any SSD provides over mechanical drives ~$250 is more than worth the price if you don't already have an SSD.
However, I now prefer to buy SSD models that have been available for more than 6 months.
I've owned 6 SSDs and 4 of them failed (3 OCZ, BTW). I've seen some really crazy failure modes. I don't buy OCZ anymore :/
One SSD I had, it came from the store booting into a busted Win98 install. I managed to install an entire new OS, including a soft reboot. OK, OS install complete.
After a hard reboot (power off), the drive would boot back up into the broken Win98 install. That was my first inkling of just how fundamentally different SSDs were internally compared to standard HDDs. I had trouble even coming up with a reasonable hypothesis to explain that failure mode. See e.g: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SS...
It would now not surprise me to learn that other types of SSD failures could result in data loss you might not neccesarily notice at first.
But definitely, backups to HDD. 256GB backs up fast, so it's not too bad.
Even if you do think SSD's are horribly unreliable, they're so fast that they're still worth using. Just put your OS and programs on a SSD and store your data on a HD. If the SSD fails, you've lost nothing you can't reinstall easily. I started doing this a couple of years ago and there's absolutely no going back.
At this point I would recommend buying SSDs that have proven track records; don't buy cheapest on the basis that any SSD is better than any HDD.