Solid State gaming Question

Ok first things first I am building a monster rig right now that will be my multimedia powerhouse. It will be my uber gaming rig, my home theater center, my recording studio and etc. So obviously I am going to pay a pretty penny for this thing. At its core is the Gigabye EX-58-UD5 and an overclocked Core i7. At some point I plan water cooling etc.

The storage portion of this beast is just as ridiculous as the rest. I will be triple booting three main OS: Windows 7 x64, OS X (purchased Leopard a year ago for my hackbook and now Snow Leopard yesterday for this rig), and some form of Linux. Each OS will have its own dedicated drive, a 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black (x3). Additionally there are two 1 TB Western Digital Black drives for general storage and backup that will sync the home folders between the OSes. Recently however I have considered the addition of a solid state drive to the mix, but I do have reservations. It is my understanding the SSD performance degrades over time by nature and also eventually become unusable after a certain amount of writes. Because of this I am wary to use it as an OS disk (indexing in Windows, plus I reformat every 3-4 months to keep it clean) but I am primarily interested in them for their a)Boot Time (but like I said I am wary for an OS use) and b)Multimedia Streaming and Gaming.

Now this may seem like an odd question but say I intend its use for streaming HD videos and the drive for my video game installs. Storing the HD files is not a problem but given my reformat habits, is there a way to keep the games installed on the SSD after a reformat without reinstalling them (and thus avoiding additional writes)? I know I could just leave the files there and reformat, but the OS reinstall would break registry links and the like (perhaps a registry backup and then restore post-install?)

Perhaps I am over thinking this, but I am curious. I don't know too much about SSD's but I do know that they are extremely fast in comparison to disk based HDD's and I'd like to reap the benefits. Thanks for the help!

One of the benefits of the reinstall the OS is clearing up the registry of extraneous entries. A restore would negate that.