What you call the reservoir method is also known as a "lettuce raft" - a foodsave containers such as a rubbermaid, with nutrients below and an airstone to "bubble/aerate" the solution from below. The plants sit on a "raft" that floats on top of the nutrients.

I've had great luck with these and smaller herbs and veggies. In the summer, I use them outdoors and in the winter indoors. I use netcup with hydroton, and GH nutrients and it's worked very well...one of the easiest methods for hydro!

more info on my website along with pics and howto's on hydroponics

-Eric
TechnologyGarden.net

To my knowledge the most accurate term for this growing method is actually Deep Water Cultivation, abbreviated as DWC. The "lettuce raft" is a variation of DWC, but not all DWC's are raft types. If the growing media is rigged to float on the reservoir surface then it's a raft, if it's fixed above the surface it's more a "classic" DWC.

Of course none of that matters much, it works great for many plants.

I greatly prefer hydroton for these systems since it's pretty common to end up with media in the reservoir from time to time and hydroton is easy to fish out or simply ignore until crop change. For propagation small rockwool cubes are probably the best way to go, for the same kind of reason - it's clean. Just make sure you follow the procedures for using it: pre-soaking and so on.

I use DWC for lettuce and other leafy crops like that, they're ideal for it. I like them because they finish fast, in like a month to 45 days, meaning I can skip reservoir changes altogether if I'm feeling lazy. Not recommended, but I've found that with high quality nutrients like what Advanced Nutrients makes you don't get much of a bad build-up of salts in that period of time, especially since most lettuce doesn't like strong solutions.