So, 1.5 years after purchasing Laura an EEE PC, the primary 8GB SSD has begun to fail with intermittent I/O errors. While somewhat disappointing (under two years isn't too hot for any long-term storage medium, IMO), I didn't consider it a big deal. "I'll just replace the two SSD's with a single SATA drive", I think to myself. Yeah, not so much. While most other Asus Netbooks use standard IDE or SATA interfaces for their SSDs, the 1000 has no standard storage interface. That's right: NONE. It has only a pair of PCE-e slots. This means to replace the failed SSD, you have to replace it with another SSD at around 1/2 to 2/3 the price of a complete replacement netbook.

I also noticed, while backing up the netbook to an external 1.8" 60GB USB drive (which is years older than the SSD's in the system), that the second 32GB SSD has at least one bad block on it as well.

So at the end of the day, SSD is permanently out as a storage solution in this house and Asus just lost a future customer (we currently own two) as a result of the retarded decision to omit any sort of IDE/SATA connector inside the EEE 1000. Also their decision to make the master/slave IDE settings configurable via soldering wasn't thrilling either.