Now, as a comparison, I have a working HDD in a router, since 1994 or something ! Yes’ I’m crazy but IT WORKS ! It works for a small router with a few files on it when I needed that and it works in specifications, the HDD makes some sounds but never failed. You won’t have that with a SSD, that is calculated to milk your money again in about 3 years of internet browsing. Genius, isn’t it ?!
Comparing boot times isn’t everything like comparing write speeds when the SSD is still new. Try that comparison in an year or two of use, when the SSD is 50-80% full and you will understand.

If you people want speed and reliability, learn to set up a RAID 0 or 1, or even 5 array from 2 or 3 or more HDD’s and you will have monster storage plus reliability at a lower price than a single 64 GB SSD is today ! And don’t get fooled when SSD prices will go down, suddenly, when people will see what a bog scam SSD’s are for their pockets. Don’t forget that the idea behind SSD market is to lure the clients into buying them, then enslave them to pay for a new one at every 2-3 years ! So, don’t be surprised or fooled by that, SSD is just the worst choice you can do in a computer setup. I did that choice and i replaced the piece cause is simply not worth it. For the price of a SSD, I got myself 3 HDD’s and set them on RAID and now I simply got a lot of storage, speed and reliability. Don’t let yourself fooled, SSD’s are just lies and marketing.

Thank you for the informative review and testing. The Agility 60GB is only $129 after rebate today, which is what prompted me to search for reviews on this SSD, so that I can decide whether to buy one for my Asus 1000HE netbook.

Your review covered many aspects and statistics that I believe are very helpful in making my decision. I have an Intel 80GB gen 2 on my AMD Phenom II 3.36Ghz (overclocked), and I love it. It boots up Windows 7 with six applications within just 20 seconds. Startup time, app load time, concurrent app loading, are what makes all the difference with an SSD. I am wondering how an Agility will perform on my Netbook with these statistics. I am not too concerned about the synthethic benmarks as they are mostly just, synthetic, and like you said, not noticeable.

Thank you again. Your article does cover 90% of what I need to know. I will continue to search the web to see if I can find more info on windows start and app load times.

To those who complain, please ignore them. Writing your article for everyone to benefit from is an altruistic act, and not a contest of some sort. You simply cannot please everyone. For some, it’s never enough. But hey, they can love it or leave it :^).

I would kill for one of these drives!

In fact you mention that in your article when you say “The next test is a graphics test essentially, it’s using Cinebench 10.”. Why would you benchmark a hard drive using a tool whose purpose is benchmark a graphics subsystem?
“Yes the overall score is better with the SSD installed in the netbook, but the main reason for that is the very high score of the hard drive test.”<- The only difference in the system is a new HDD, so it makes sense that the other components would show little to no change in score. If someone is looking increase the speed of their gfx card then they buy a new gfx card, not a new HDD.

The article completely glosses over the fact that the SSD random access time is 10x faster than the seagate, which is a huge factor in the real world speed of a system (OSes usually are accessing lots of small files rather than large sequential reads).

Look at these quotes from the article:
"…but what I didn’t really know was how it affected the system performance overall"
"As far as system speed, it does seem much faster and more responsive with the SSD installed, and that’s what most users are going to want from their system."
"The problem is though that the end user will not notice these minor differences"

So what you are saying is that you wanted to find out if the system becomes faster and more responsive with an SSD. You found that it does become much more responsive in practice, answering the question that you set out to ask. Then you say that the synthetic benchmarks (which have little bearing on real world use) show little to no improvement, so the end user wont notice any improvement (a direct contradiction to what you just stated.)

You also said to John:
"The idea here was to not only test the HDD and the SSD but the entire system itself to see if the drives had any bearing on the system performance. Please read before you leave a comment…"
Good idea in theory but again, your methodology was flawed. If you wanted to test the performance of the system as a whole then why not test the windows boot speed, speed of loading Photoshop, loading a batch test of 500 images and performing several actions on them, shutdown speed, speed of loading levels in games, running multiple applications (web browsing, video transcoding, winamp, photoshop batch processing concurrently) to see a) how long they take to complete b) (more subjectively) impact on performance/response times of system (ie: stuttering music in winamp) etc. (you also don't get any points for professionalism when you attack your users' reading skills…)

And finally:
"If you’re using a netbook, chances are you’re not going to be doing any hardcore computing, video editing, rendering, converting etc so I think the SDD is a great choice to give you a nice speed boost. if you’re running a full, more powerful laptop though where you might be doing much more than just web browsing you might want to rethink the idea of upgrading to an SSD though."

Again, a user isn't going to upgrade their HDD to get faster video encoding speeds, they will upgrade their CPU, or their GFX card to a card with CUDA. Same with rendering, it doesnt matter how fast the SSD can access the 3dsmax file, 99% of the work is done by the CPU and memory subsystem (the pagefile on the SSD plays a negligible role beause most computers built for rendering should have enough RAM to handle most rendering tasks without dipping into the page file too often).

In the end does it really matter? When people base their purchasing decisions on what you write, then yes it does. I am surprised that this article got past the editor.

We need to advance to solid state, its a logical next step, the Netbook will one day soon be a viable destop replacement as the gap between phones and PDA’s and Laptops close you will see some awesome powerful small footprint machines.

By the way, a netbook for $299 or so.

Look back a few years ago at this idea!!!!