SSD for an Atom machine?

[Eug]

I have an SSD in my 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro and it's awesome. Everything flies.
I have an SSD in my 1.3 GHz dual-core Pentium SU4100 and it's OK although not great. It's faster than before, but the system still gets quite bogged down from time to time.

I also have a 1.6 GHz dual-core Atom 330 (Acer Aspire Revo R3610) which is painfully slow. With SSD prices dropping into the basement, I'm starting to wonder if it's worth it to put an SSD in that too, although I'm thinking that it will still be painfully slow, just not as painfully slow as it is now. Even with decent SSDs (ie. not OCZ) coming in at double-digit $ prices now, I'm wondering if getting an SSD might just be a waste of money in this machine. This machine isn't used much, but when it's used it's for mainly surfing, email, and video playback and a few other things. However, application installs and Windows updates take forever, to the point where sometimes I wonder if the computer has hung, only to see it finally finish up a minute later or something.

So, any of you use an SSD with an Atom machine, and how much improvement did the SSD offer you in that context?

P.S. Here is a benchmark between Pentium SU7300 (which is similar to SU4100) vs. Atom 330. As you can see, Atom 330 isn't even in the same league as SU7300 for pure CPU performance, and these CULV chips such as SU7300 are already pretty slow.

http://liliputing.com/2009/12/culv-ion-or-dual-core-atom-with-ion.html

 

[LurchFrinky]

Don't laugh, but I think this is the perfect place for an OCZ SSD.
Because of how slow everything is to begin with, ANY improvement becomes noticeable and measureable "in the real world."
It's not worth putting much money into it, because after a few hundred $, you could have bought a new machine anyway.
Based off of your projected usage, you don't need a very big or very fast SSD.
Based off of your projected usage, you can afford to have some questionable reliability in this system (always make backups).

That being said, I don't have an atom machine with an SSD. I would also like to hear from someone who has.

 

[Blain]

Corsair SSD for the Atom.

 

[razel]

I had two Atom notebooks early back when they were single core. One was 1GB of RAM with XP, the other Win7 Starter. Win7 ran better, but it consumed more RAM. Even after upgrading to 2GB, it was still torturous. Throwing an $160 Intel 80GB SSD in at the time was the ONLY thing that made it bareable. It made it obvious that the CPU held it back. However $160 was almost half the cost of the netbook. We eventually sold it and bought a more competent 11" Core-based lappy instead.

I recommend the same. Don't spend too much money on the SSD, otherwise your total money can be better spent selling the Atom and buying a non-Atom based alternative, like the HP dm1z.

Right now, the OCZ Petrol 128GB is available for $75 from Microcenter. It was $65 last week. It is OCZ but fortunately it is not SandForce based and uses the same controller found on the Crucial M4 but with lower cost NAND. As long as you backup, I wouldn't worry about it. I bought one when it was $80 and friends and family bought 3 more @ $65. I torture tested it in 7 different computers and they're still running. I'm still crossing my fingers since it's just over a month, but I got backups so we're not worried.

Anyhow, in the meantime if you must keep the Atom, go Win7, max out your RAM to 2GB and try using Readyboost via SD card or USB stick. Then try to get the Petrol if it's still bad. Best of luck.

 

[Eug]

Heh, I also briefly had that thought of putting in an el cheapo OCZ in my el cheapo Atom machine. I guess it kinda makes sense, but I figure if I can get a non-OCZ for 20 bux more I'd rather do that. I'll see what's available.

It's already got Win 7 Home and 2 GB RAM, plus a ReadyBoost SD card.

The reason I want to keep it is because it came with a VESA monitor mount, so that it mounts on the back of the monitor, off the table and out of the way.

 

[unokitty]

I'm writing this on a machine that uses a dual core Celeron SU2300 CPU on a Zotac IONITAC P-E Motherboard.

At the office, I've got a dual core Atom that I built based on the Zotac A-U Atom 330.

The Atom machine has an SSD. And I like it alot. It boots up much quicker than the Celeron machine. Since I built it with the SSD, I can't really compare its performance to an HD...

I use them both for email, surfing, Utube video playback, and light word processing. Both of them work fine for my use.

Whether or not an SSD would improve the performance of your computer depends on where your machine is bogging down at... For example, if it is bogging down with video playback, then an SSD likely won't help. If it is bogging down somewhere else then it might ...

Note that the machines that I mentioned both use NVIDEA, rather than Intel, video. And both machines have 4 GB of RAM.

Note also that I run Mint Linux on both of them. Since I haven't install Windows on either of them, I can't comment on Windows performance.

If I were in your place, I'd give some consideration to also replacing the motherboard along with the HD.

Best of luck,
Uno

 

[Eug]

OK you've convinced me. I almost considered the 120 GB OCZ Agility 3 for $55, but instead bought an 120 GB Intel 330 for $110 - twice as much. The only issue now is how to recapture the space from the 14 GB recovery partition takes up.

 

[Eug]

So, I installed the Intel SSD and shortly afterwards I got a BSOD. However, I'm hoping it's a RAM issue since I had installed an extra 1 GB RAM I just happened to have laying around (increasing it to 3 GB). I ran the Windows Memory Diagnostic program and it said there was some sort of hardware error. After I reseated the memory, the error went away.

Otherwise the SSD is a huge improvement. This dual-Atom machine is now quite a decent surfer. It actually in some ways feels faster than my Pentium SU4100 laptop to my surprise. The only issue is that it seems to run hotter than both my existing Hitachi 5K500 5400 rpm drive and my Kingston V+100 SSDs.

I have an SSD in my 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro and it's awesome. Everything flies.
I have an SSD in my 1.3 GHz dual-core Pentium SU4100 and it's OK although not great. It's faster than before, but the system still gets quite bogged down from time to time.

2.26 GHz C2D MacBook Pro + Kingston V+100 SSD = Awesome
1.30 GHz Pentium SU4100 + Kingston V+100 SSD = OK, not great
1.60 GHz dual-core Atom 330 + Intel 330 SSD = Good

 

[fuzzymath10]

My dad's netbook has a 160GB hard drive; my netbook has an OEM 8GB SSD. Despite the capacity issue, the SSD netbook feels much faster in use; I think almost any machine can benefit from an SSD because it doesn't take much CPU cycles to handle huge amounts of data anymore, and even an Atom is heavily bottlenecked when your hard drive is feeding it random data at <1MB/sec.

 

[Eug]

8 GB?!? Are you running Linux or something, cuz even Linux alone would feel faster.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

An Atom CPU is still fast enough that a platter HD is the main system bottleneck. I say go for it.

I put a 40GB SSD in an older Pentium 4-M laptop. (That's right, not M, 4-M) and it helped a lot-lot-lot. Seriously. And an Atom is faster than by a wide margin.

(Of course, then one of the DIMM slots died, so I'm stuck with 512MB of RAM...)

 

[unokitty]

Otherwise the SSD is a huge improvement. This dual-Atom machine is now quite a decent surfer. It actually in some ways feels faster than my Pentium SU4100 laptop to my surprise. The only issue is that it seems to run hotter than both my existing Hitachi 5K500 5400 rpm drive and my Kingston V+100 SSDs.

Glad to hear that!

And thanks for sharing.

Uno

 

[Eug]

I just used the Pentium SU4100 machine with the SSD again after a long hiatus. However, this time I made sure there was no ReadyBoost SD card in, and both Superfetch and Prefetch were turned off. Indexing on.

It feels snappy enough. I don't know if it turning off all those things makes a difference, but it feels faster than what I originally remember it feeling like. Maybe I was just imagining things or was comparing too much against the 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo, or else maybe ensuring that ReadyBoost is deactivated did speed things up in the period immediately after bootup, I'm not sure. And maybe having a more recent version of Flash has helped, since older versions were not multi-core optimized.

However, I'd rate the the Pentium SU4100 + SSD as good for overall OS feel.

---

BTW, after using the dual-core Atom some more for several days: It's been perfectly stable. No BSODs. However, the Atom will bog down on some Flash heavy and other content heavy web pages. It's still way, way better overall then when I had the platter drive though of course.

 

[joshhedge]

I must agree with you Eug,

Adding a 120GB Force 3 to my 2.5GHz dual core MBP was the single biggest noticeable leap in performance I've ever experienced!

Glad everything's worked out well with your new upgrade

 

[Zunhs]

I bought an Octane OCT1-25SAT2-128G in the end of April and it improved the starting of programs and multitasking on my Asus EEE 1001PXD with Intel Atom N455 1.66 GHz. The performance index looked good in Windows 7 and I disabled sleep mode and let the computer run 24/7. After less than two months I got a BSOD and now the SSD can't be found in BIOS. Luckily the seller agreed to let me upgrade to a Samsung 128 GB 830. Hopefully it will arive early next week.