# Is putting a fast SSD in a netbook worthwhile?



## Azoriah (Oct 1, 2009)

I own an Acer aspire one that has an Atom N270 @ 1.6Ghz, 1 Gb ram, and (as far as I can tell) has a 120Gb 2.5" 5400rpm SATA HDD.
I'm considering replacing the HDD with a fast SSD such as an Intel X25, or a Patriot Torqx.
Ignoring the fact that the SSD would be worth more than the entire netbook, could the rest of the system keep up with the SSD?


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## A Cheese Danish (Oct 1, 2009)

Yeah, should be able to. Quite a few netbooks have SSD's in them already.


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## Pinchy (Oct 1, 2009)

I dont know if a netbook would be worth the money of putting an SSD in.

Really, it comes down to your taste. If you want that slightly faster windows loading time, or if you keep a stack of songs on your netbook that you want to search through faster, get it...otherwise, its probably a waste of money. I was on an atom today, I dont think it would be worth the money.

Just my 2c


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## Disparia (Oct 1, 2009)

I would, though I'd go with an SSD on the cheap side, unless I was going to be on my netbook more than a couple hours each day.


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## Azoriah (Oct 1, 2009)

The netbook is already pretty responsive, but it takes a long time loading big applications (such as Office07, Matlab, Maple, etc). It can sometimes take ~30 seconds to load a big excel sheet. Plus if I were to put an SSD in it, I wouldn't have to worry about losing data if I drop it.


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## RejZoR (Oct 1, 2009)

Yes, it's very tempting. But even though Intel drives are awesome, they are too expensive.
Just SSD would cost more than complete netbook. I'll wait for OCZ to release cheaper drives with indilinx controllers. When i'll be able to get 160GB drive for ~150 eur with good performance, i might consider one. It's still a lot compared to regular HDD's, but much more normal than 300+ eur for 160GB...

You can try this:
http://flashfire.org/xe

It gives quite some boost even to regular HDD drives in the lower write size range, but it's still in earlier BETA stage and has certain problems with programs that require direct disk access (backup programs etc). But it improves write speed significantly.


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## BazookaJoe (Oct 1, 2009)

I must say that I think an SSD is a great idea for a netbook - they are already pretty low end PC's with a lot of delays & an SSD would really help smooth out the performance a bit no matter what you where doing.

*Jizzler* - Is also very correct in that although an SSD would really help in a Netbook - a lower end one would be a far better buy - the netbook wont really benefit from a High data rate SSD as its CPU / RAM / BUS  really ain't all that good to begin with, what the Netbook really benefits from is the significantly reduced seek times in reading all of the hundreds of little DLL's & such whenever you do anything.

Any lower end SSD is a good buy as long as it has reasonable seek times - because that's going to make far more of a difference in a non-load-intensive environment.


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