It was also my first SSD based netbook, while i did experiment with Linux based VDR (DVB-S) before, in which i decided to install 4GB SSD as a system drive for fast boot, 2007, AFAIR. My eeePC was a later edition, including 3G sim slot and most components were covered by a plastic sheet inside, for dust protection. It was the perfect tool for hacking on the road and wardriving in urban areas.
At least you were aware back then about what a performance bottleneck storage was. It seemed as if CPU speed was the only thing a lot of people cared about. I remember a friend being annoyed that my old Socket7 AMD K6-2 system was visibly faster than his brand spanking new Pentium3 system. I pointed out that I had 4 times as much RAM and a faster HDD.
I was always fascinated by the idea of booting from solid-state storage but flash memory capacities were too small then. In 2005 Gigabyte brought out iRAM which put 4 DIMMs on a PCI card to allow fast booting but it was vulnerable to power outages. I backed off until decently sized SLC non-volatile SSDs became available a year or two later. My big breakthrough came when I replaced my RAID-0 array of 4 10000RPM WD Raptors with 4 OCZ Vertex SSDs in RAID-0. I was disappointed to find it was bottlenecked by my motherboard's southbridge. I had to get a PCIe RAID card to get full performance. From there I graduated to my first OCZ Revodrive.
Those were the days.
You mention wardriving. Many people didn't bother to protect their wifi back then so wardriving was a thing. I remember warning people about protecting their wifi after an incident in Toronto's west end. The cops stopped a car at 5:00am driving the wrong way on a residential street. They found the driver with his pants at his ankles masturbating as he downloaded kiddie porn onto his laptop using other people's wifi networks. Good thing the cops got the guy. Imagine some sucker sleeping innocently at home not knowing he was getting put on the kiddie porn list.
