aoa110 ssd broken, what next?

When the SSD goes it goes fast. I'm getting tons of media and WRITE DMA errors. Seems like its done.

To at least get a limping system working it'd be nice to be able to boot off one of the cards. Is that possible with the drive being totally toast? New updated bios or something? Or maybe just some cheap way to replace the SSD (although I'm not sure this thing is worth the time to take apart anymore).

 

AAO 110 takes PATA ZIF 1,3" (and with some effort and hw modding, also 1,8") drives. The easiest way to find suitable brands and models is to look for Apple Air 1st generation compatible drives, some Apple iPods also use them. Be careful with the latter, there are several different iPods around, and all the drives are not compatible. There are also some SSD's with PATA ZIF connectors, I'd recommend those. But when it comes to the data on your current drive, I'm afraid it's gone. Maybe if you are extremely lucky it's just the ZIF cable which might have loosened at wither the drive or motherboard end along time and causes the errors? Check this one out first.

 

i stuck the machine in a drawer for parts. the headache and cost involved in fixing that machine just isn't worth it. i should consider parting it out on ebay i guess.

 

If you like the little bugger, then repairing it is well worth it. Parts are not expensive and it is fun to tinker with these, at least in my opinion A second-hand 80-gig (or was it 60, can't remember) Air hdd cost about 15 euros to me and a 30-gig ssd was 40 euros and the prices are higher up here in the north. Of course if you were just looking for a good excuse to get a new laptop then it's a different story. When the panel says goodbye then it's worse, they are the most and easiest breaking parts so they are not so common in the wild, and new ones tend to cost an arm and a leg compared to the price of a second-hand AAO. A good tip here is that the HP Minis 2133 tend to cook their mobos. The panel in them is a matte one with a protective plastic shield so they stay usually intact... and the quality is good. They also fit to 8.9" AAO's with no modifications.

 

There are several zif pata drives on eBay. How do I find out which are useable for the aoa110?

 

My SSD went down some time ago. It turned out to be gunk on the connector. However I replaced it anyway with a cheap CF adapter. I just upgraded the 16G 133X CF to 32G 600X It runs like S**T off a shovel. Cold boot in 7 secs. search for topram from Taiwan. I also have a ZG5 and a D250. They take about 27 seconds to boot from their SATA drives. The CF gives about 43MB/s read-write. And it slides under the MB with no hacking. I stuck some Kapton on it for protection. I considered going with zif PATA, but this is what was best for me. $48 US or so buys 80G Samsung drive, if you need the extra internal Gigs.

 

You can still install a Linux distribution on an USB stick and continue using your Aspire one.

Personnaly, I'm using Ubuntun 12.04 LTS installed on an USB flash stick. Since My USB stick isn't really quick in writing mode, it's a bit slow, but still works for the use I'm asking for my netbook (limitation : use only a software at a time, to avoid swap memory)

But it doesn't work with windows (except Bart XP - the solution I have is only written in french)