Netbook Operating System Choice

[Puddle Jumper]

No.
Even if the drive were only running in UDMA 4 or 5 mode it still doesnt matter. SSD's dont do anything to speed besides open up the bottleneck of that mechanical spinning disk. You dont need a special controller or anything to get the best performance out of them, because aluminum and glass hard drives were so horribly slow to begin with. Now we are finally getting the speeds we've been promised all these years with SATA 2 and 3, and fully using the UDMA 5 & 6 interfaces.

You do need Windows 7 (or linux) to get the best performance from a SSD. Windows XP and Vista don't support TRIM so your SSDs performance will degrade over time if you are using them.

Removing the bottleneck of a mechanical drive is a massive boost to performance in and of itself. I upgraded my netbook (N270, 2gb ram, Win 7 Pro) with a OCZ Vertex 2 40gb and it made a massive difference in how the system performs. With the SSD it has no problem whatsoever running 7 and it even feels faster than many desktops that have faster hardware but mechanical hard drives.

 

[Patmage]

I'm using easypeasy on my Eee right now. While i hate the name it seems to be working pretty well for me. Currently all i really use it for is some web browsing and as a mythtv frontend(which takes forever to load but plays SD shows rather well). I use to use eeebuntu, which I really liked because it was the first OS that everything on my Eee worked right out of the box. Sadly the developers took issue with a lot of Ubuntu changes so they decided to switch over to debian unstable. It seems it is taking far longer then they expected though as there still isn't an iso posted on their website.

 

[SimMike2]

You do need Windows 7 (or linux) to get the best performance from a SSD. Windows XP and Vista don't support TRIM so your SSDs performance will degrade over time if you are using them.

Removing the bottleneck of a mechanical drive is a massive boost to performance in and of itself. I upgraded my netbook (N270, 2gb ram, Win 7 Pro) with a OCZ Vertex 2 40gb and it made a massive difference in how the system performs. With the SSD it has no problem whatsoever running 7 and it even feels faster than many desktops that have faster hardware but mechanical hard drives.

Thanks for backing me up. While an SSD does little if nothing to improve raw processing speed, it greatly improves how your operating system and programs run, thereby breathing new life into a computer that was barely usable with a regular hard drive. This would be even more dramatic on a computer with 1GB of ram. People that say an SSD doesn't improve the performance of a computer have probably never did the upgrade. It is very dramatic. I will never use a regular hard drive for my OS again.