Been toying withthe idea of buying a smallish drive, 30-60Gb, running the OS and a few key programs only. Read loads of reviews which all say how much quicker the system is but also how some of the drives are very unreliable and many take a fair bit of setting up.
I've been using Asus eeePC netbooks for three years now, both of which use SSD drives. Honestly, I don't understand the plethora of netbooks that saturated the market with regular platter hard drives. Makes no sense beyond the manufacturer making more money from customers that are unaware of the advantages.
Some SSDs (particularly the cheap end of the market) are quite slow and can be slower than a hard drive. The ones that are better/faster tend to be more expensive.
As an example, some of the early/cheap netbooks came with dead-slow SSDs that effectively cripple the system - this included some Dell models. Later ones improved on this. My own experience of this comes from my first netbook that came with two SSDs. A small primary "fast" SSD and a larger but slower secondary SSD - because it would have been too expensive to use a large "fast" SSD at that time. My second netbook, which is the same model but newer, has a single "fast" SSD and it feels significantly faster (not that the previous machine felt lethargic or anything).
If you're buying one to replace your main drive, you'd better look into the speeds and benefits. Some SSDs that are intended to be USB hard drives won't be particularly fast because they don't have to be (USB2 doesn't capitalise on the speed available to faster drives).
I like SSDs because they reduce the number of moving parts in the computer and I've had no problems with any unreliability or setting up. They just behave like chip-based hard drives, that's all, but then mine came pre-installed. It just annoys me that you can't buy any "real" netbooks these days - they've all got larger, more bloated, and use platter hard drives, all of which is the complete antithesis of the original netbook concept.
I've been following the development of these 'slates' since April. The forum is very active and the 'inventor' (Username:EXOPC Location:CanadaOccupation:Chairman & CTO of EXOPC) is always at hand to answer questions and accept development ideas. It's become a rather 'open source' device.
Oh, I didn't realise it wasn't widely available yet. I Googled for it and found some review sites with "hands on reviews" from way back in May, so I thought it was more prolific.
The price is a little steep for my tastes (my last netbook was £180 - which shows you what a skinflint I am). US$699 for what appears to be a tablet with netbook inners kind of puts me off. If it was half that price, I'd be in there with far less hesitation.
This was the drive I looked at but having read reviews the reliability comes into question. Also, the read/write speeds are supposed to only be possible during benchmark tests, not in day to day work.
