Which is better? Solid State Drive or hard drives?

[JEDI]

i've been racking my brain over this one, and i dont know which is better for a netbook.

my WinXP image takes up ~4gigs, so i have 4gigs free space.

pros of Solid State Drive:
instant on (?)
if i fill up the 8gig ssd, there's always usb flash drive and/or sd cards

so which is better? Solid State Drive or hard drives?

WHY?

 

[frostedflakes]

Speed wise, the SSDs in netbooks tend to be pretty bad. The one in my Mini 9 is just painfully slow, although Win 7 seems to run pretty well on it. Other OS I tried that aren't as optimized for SSDs ran like crap, though.

I'd definitely recommend a hard drive if it's available on the netbook you want.

 

[corkyg]

SSDs are in their infancy. There are good ones and not so good ones. Those in a netbook are usually not so good because they are in a cheap charlie niche. Good SSDs are still relatively expensive. HDDs are mature technology, and especially at the low end (i.e. Netbooks) are more reliable.

 

[Nohr]

In a netbook I'd definitely get a HDD. I've got a 16GB SSD in my Aspire One and it is a huge bottleneck. Windows 7 has helped, it's faster than XP was, but it can still get bogged down.

 

[soccerballtux]

Yeah just get the harddrive. As corkyg said the ones in netbooks are usually terrible. You can look into FlashFire if you do get an SSD, however you are at risk for data loss with that if you don't save everything and shut down/suspend or plug into the wall before the battery dies.

On Acer Aspire One forums there are some guys that benchmarked, basically they said they noticed a minimal performance improvement with the SSD.
Laptop drives have come a long way. 160GB on a single platter and 5400RPM is pretty fast.

 

[cparker]

Well, I think it depends on a number of things. Yes, if you pick up a chep netbook with an SSD it's not going to be of the fast variety. A great 8gb SSD will cost you 100 dollars or so. That's for the SLC model (at least I've seen one for around that price on the Egg for older PATA interfaces). For many laptops that might make for a great speed increase. That being said, the current 5400 rpm hard drives for laptops are pretty speedy, as has been said by others. I have a Samsung NC10 with a SATA 160 drive that seems to "fly", and I wouldn't think of using an SSD on it. But on some older laptops with IDE/PATA interfaces, I've been tempted.

You might want to check out the reviews at Newegg on some of these SSD drives.

 

[yh125d]

I wouldn't go SSD for netbook until you can get one thats ~30gb at least and speed more in line with the common desktop SSDs for cheap

 

[ilkhan]

I had a dell mini9 with no moving parts (no fan, no HDD), was great being able to throw it around without having to shut it down or worrying about the disk. But it was pretty slow too.