Patriot Pyro 60 GB SSD - Worth it on SATA2 for performance?

I recently bought a Patriot Pyro 60GB SSD SATA III. For just under 95$(September 2011) including tax and shipping, it seems about time that I get a replacement for my 4 year old 7200RPM 100GB Hitachi drive. Although that drive was quite quiet compared to newer 5400RPM drives, I still did not like the sound of a drive.

My system is a Lenovo ThinkPad T61p with the latest BIOS from middleton. The Intel chipset is SATA II, one should expect speeds which are comparable with other SATA II drives and not something which leaves a lot to desire. I could have purchased a larger drive for close to the same amount of money, which could have meant better performance, but I thought it would be better to get the latest technology as improvements come with each generation of hardware.

At 35 years of age I should have died a long time if this were a different era. My hearing and eyesight are not the world's best, but still quite good. Unfortunately, that means that any little sound, or off colour will drive me nuts. I still can hear my computer even with the fan off and a SSD. The inverter on the LCD isn't a problem on maximum brightness or on a mid-low setting, but somewhere I hear the electronic high pitch noise from my system. It may be the PCI bus or CPU power saving, it may be the SSD. The best test would be to put the SSD in an external enclosure and listen during benchmark tests. ( I am quite sure it is the CPU power management - once disabled I no longer hear an intermittent high pitch noise. It is a common problem with Core 2 Duo CPUs. )

Regarding the performance of the Patriot Pyro, I am not impressed. To be honest, it really sucks. I only have a SATA 3 Gbps bus, but my drive comes nowhere near the spec. Here are my results using AS SSD benchmark software.

The above leaves a lot to desire considering I saw much higher values on the same system with older SATAII drives.
Boot time has not been measured. I am not sure what tools other than a stopwatch exist, but with a fresh install, updates, system specific software etc, this should be "standard" boot. I should try and see if disabling wireless and Bluetooth makes the boot faster. Would that mean that the drivers are not optimized for fast booting? Once I tried the benchmarks with more data on disk, with still about 20GB free, the data transfer rate dropped further. A new firmware should be released soon, but I do not like the straight to market beta.
CrystalDiskMark does look a little better, but still the performance of the Patriot Pyro is not quite as responsive that I was expecting from a SSD. Should I replace the drive, I will definitely go with an OCZ or Corsair. Patriot makes budget products, but you really do get what you pay for. In this case, the 95$ for the drive was not worth it! Patriot Pyro is a total failure in my book.

My Windows Experience Index  (WEI) is a little off with older drivers (I have not update everything). The video rating of the Quadro FX 570M was 6.5 for Aero ( which I do not use because it takes system resources and makes the GPU run at a higher temperature ) and 6.5 for business and gaming graphics, but it may be underclocked at the time of testing. CPU (Core 2 Duo T7500) and RAM( 4GB DDR2-PC2 6400) are not really my priorities, but I would not mind something that is cooler and dual channel RAM could be better, but I know a single stick of RAM means less energy consumption. The Pyro has a rating of 7.5 - that may mean nothing, but only time will tell if a) it holds, b) Windows 8 comes around with benchmarks that make my aging machine seem ancient.

I tried playing a game, and I feel that the load time are just about the same as before as with my Hitachi. Should I try a different game? Performance is the least important to me when it come to computers. It's comfort and quality. Maybe this post is a big contradiction, or me just bragging about my let down from Patriot. Fortunately,  when writing this, I think a able to concentrate with the only noise I hear is coming from the keyboard or someone else in a distant room watching TV.