Does it make sense to install SSDs on server?

I want to build a server hosting about 2TB+ data. Of course SSD is out of the picture in terms of the data drive. My question is: Is there any benefit to use SSDs as the boot drive? I plan to put 16G memory on it. I think most of the time the services should be loaded in memory and the server should rarely require rebooting. In this case, does it make sense to get SSD or just get a RAID1 with two SATA drives?

I don't think so, not at this time. They're expensive, it's a relatively new technology that's not without its own problems; Jeff Atwood has an interesting blog post about the advantages and disadvantages of using them.

Given your intended use case the need for an SSD seems even smaller. You normally see huge benefits when booting and when opening up apps, but on a data server with a lot of RAM that rarely gets rebooted there's no point in spending the extra money.

It depends on the kind of server, but generally speaking, yes, it should be a good idea.

SSD drives are best for read-only data, which is usually what servers are as opposed to workstations. So it has that going for it.

Also, the faster a file can be served, the better the server will be, and since SSD drivers are supposed to be faster, it has that going for it as well.

Finally, SSD drives usually use less power, make less noise, and generate less heat, so the server will require less electricity and cooling (which are the banes of server-rooms the world over), so it has that going for it too.

That said, again it depends on the specifics of your server and case-usage (eg, 16GB sounds good, but will the files be cached in RAM or have to be fetched from disk anyway?), as well as the actual drives in question. Overall however, yes, most servers are generally better off with SSD drives.

With this situation, an SSD boot drive will probably only improve boot time, once everything is started and in RAM (you have 16GB) it won't make any difference. Maybe if you kept a 10GB+ database on it it might help, but probably better to spend the money on more magnetic drives (possibly for redundancy).