The risk of failure was a problem initially but not really an issue with current genereation drives. Saying that, get an intel drive and you should be sweet for your OS etc. Good warranty, as long as you backup regularly your data should be protected so a hard drive failure (which can easily happen with a mechanical hdd too) should ot be a major issue for you. Most SSDs you would buy will have 1,000,000h MTBF which means on average, a drive used 24/7 will last over 100 years. Most 2.5" mechanical hdd quote an AFR of 0.5% which equates to about 2,000,000 MTBF.

Considering the higher tolerance SSDs have for shock than mechanical drives, use in notebooks is a good application.

With regards to monitor size an external monitor is a perfect solution, but keep in mind the video card in your system will probably have issues with driving multiple screens or high resolution screens such as 1920 x 1080/1200 24" LCDs.