Am I crazy for preferring SSD?

I'm planning on purchasing an Aspire One as soon as I can find one in a retail store that doesn't have the 120GB hard drive. As I understand it, solid state memory weighs less, is shock resistant, and uses power more efficiently than a magnetic drive, plus it allows for a slimmer case on the Aspire. These are all good things in my book, but then I hear about everyone wanting to mod their AA1's to remove the SSD and now I'm just nonplussed.

Am I crazy for preferring SSD?

 

Crazy? Of course not. I chose the SSD as well. Didn't want a crashing HDD on my netbook. Or else why would I need a netbook? I have 2 other subnotebooks already. Depending on you're needs. As long as you don't plan to install alot of stuff and download music, video etc etc. The SSD model is right for you.

 

for shock absorption, yeah probably its a plus.
but the supposed advantage in power consumption is not really tangible for the moment, as SSDs are still not fast enough and drivers not optimized for the different technology.
if you add this to the lack of space you would suffer, its just not something that I would find useful at the moment.
I am sure I will reassess this in about a year, when should be no problem to get a 128GB SSD with decent performance for a fair price.
To each his own, though. If you can do with the small space, I suppose there is a certain advantage to it.

 

If you are then so am I and many others here. I prefer the SSD version myself.

 

I bought mine because I wanted the SSD. Lighter, faster, and you can impress your geek friends when you say you're packing an SSD

I added a 6GB SDHC card ($14cdn) to the expansion, and I have 2 8GB thumb drives($20 cdn ea) and a 80GB 2.5" dirve in en external enclosure that give me all the portable storage I could want.

Also there's already bigger SSD drives coming out that you'll be able to replace the stock one with if you don't mind cracking open the case. They're not that expensive either.

 

not that expensive?

im not sure we are talking about the same piece of kit then.

 

well, i bought the 8bg version since i really want to have a netbook. ( the HDD is not yet available by that time ). The speed of the SSD (especially the Intel SSD) was terrible at first (installed XP on NTFS). but after formatting the SSD using fat32, it became acceptable. for additional space, I added 8GB class 6 sdhc card (PQI brand) and installed it as a fixed drive...

never been happier now...

 

I bought the SSD version for exactly one reason, and that is shock resistance. In terms of throughput or storage area size real hard drives cannot be beaten by SSDs at the moment.

I do not really know, how sensitive modern hard disks still are with respect to shocks, but when used during travel in busses, trains and alike I feel a certain danger a headcrash could happen. At least all of what I heard about new disks having special anti-shock-features was dealing with real crashes when falling down to the floor and even then a certain minimum height was required to give the harddisks sensors a chance to react and retreat the heads to safe position.

Regards

Guido

 

Given how fragile the screen is in the AA1 the shock resistance of the SSD is less of an advantage than it should be.

 

Less of an advantage.... ok try knocking the AAO around while it is ON. Try that on both SSD and HD models... make a wild guess w/c one would die 1st.

 

Nope you're not crazy. SSD is preferable in every way IMO. Its the perfect solution for netbooks. The only problem with the ones that ship in the Aspire One is their speed. The price for a gig of SSD technology is far higher than for HDDs. So in order to put an SSD in such a low cost device as the One compromises had to be made with the model they chose - e.g. smaller capacity, lower read/write speed, pata rather than sata, mini-card rather than fully-enclosed...

Third party SSD upgrades have massively better performance but they cost a lot. So to have a netbook with an SSD that performs the way that most people seem think they 'should', would have pushed the price of the One up equally massivley. By too much to make it saleable probably. So maybe the real problem is consumers not understanding their products - people seem to want everything for nothing these days!

 

Real easy to speed the SSD up install "Flash Point" found on this site, I did it about two months back it is great now this little bugger boots faster then my tower.

Phil

 

I preferred the SSD as well. It was cheaper, and I wouldn't have to worry about the hard drive crashing due to being bounced around since I throw the AAO in my backpack with no protection but a slip case. And with flashpoint running on tinyXP this thing runs faster than my full size laptop. Sure there isn't as much storage, but with my USB-powered external hdd it gives me enough space.

 

I prefer the SSD as well. I got the D150 as the replacement for my AA0 when the screen cracked (the shop didn't have any AAO anymore and the insurance was paying for it but had to get it in that shop) but will probably replace the screen and put the gig of RAM from the D150 into the AA0 and get a 2 GB for that.

 

I started with an AA1 SSD/Linux, partly because my laptops often travel on a motorcycle. The trackpad connector came loose, and the right trackbutton stopped working. I managed to destroy a connector while trying to repair it (my fault, not Acer's), and I replaced that machine with a new 10"/160gb HDD. From my perspective, the new AA1 design is superior in every way, especially the fact that you can access RAM and HDD through access ports without invalidating the warranty. The 160gb HDD is much faster than the SSD, and gives me plenty of room to run both Windows XP and Linux (Ubuntu). With the 3-cell battery from my first AA1, the new one is nearly as svelte. If I really wanted a SSD, Kensington has a 32gb SATA 2.5" form factor SSD; with the new AA1 design, it's a plug and play replacement for the HDD. I have also installed Ubuntu on an 8gb SDHC memory card, which is bootable from the card reader slot. The SDHC is faster than the old SSD, but slower than the HDD.

Re durability of HDD, although this is not an apples to apples comparison (no pun intended), three years ago I rode a motorcycle 11,000 miles to Alaska and back with a 2-year old Apple iBook, which I never turned off while riding. Temperatures ranged up to 100 degrees (more inside black luggage), and roads included some big potholes on the upper reaches of the Yukon, and 120 miles of bumpy, dusty dirt road on the Denali highway. That iBook is still going strong. Modern HDDs are much more durable than in the past, and I would hope that a 2009 HDD would be even more shock resistant than one from 2004.