Which should I keep: 8 solid state or 80 G?

Hi, Totally new to all this, bought the one with the 8 solid state GB plus 8 SD, with XP, then Walmart had the 80 GB for $30 more, so right now I own both and have to return one quickly! Focus is on durability, we want to travel to Europe with it. Friend says the solid state one is better, because no moving parts. Obviously 80 gives more storage, but can't think of what I'd put on it besides pictures. Otherwise the specs look the same to me. Help!

 

I also have the 8 solid state that I purchased during Circuit City's recent close out sale. My main intention with the computer is for email and uploading pictures during travel. I also purchased a 16GB Scandisk flash drive so I can save my uploaded pictures to that while on vacation. If I had plans to use this as a laptop and wanted to run word, excel or do actual work than I would probably go for a HDD but since it's use is primarly internet I think the SSD is good enough for my plans.

 

thanks. I did find the thread on this topic after I posted, but I must admit that I don't understand a lot of it. I am brand new to SDD. I am setting up the HDD one and I am going to see if one is faster. I have found the SSD one to be very slow in loading internet pages. Is there any *easy* help for this?

 

If you're using Firefox, move the cache to a ramdisk then download and run Firetune 1.2.0

 

uh, thanks. Sorry but I have no idea what you said! Anyway, I don't think I have Firefox. By the way, I've been experimenting all evening, and the one with the HDD does seem to load pages faster than the one with the SSD.

 

Try creating a ramdisk and moving the Temporary Internet Files folder to run from the ramdisk.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/2 ... 03-server/

There's a few you can try.

do you know how to move the temporary internet files folder? I'm assuming your using IE7?

Control panel -> internet options -> Browsing History (Settings button) -> Move Folder.

Of course, you will want to create the ramdisk first. You don't need a really big one, i'd advise using something small like 50-100MB for it, and move it to the ramdisk.

 

Long story short, if you want speed go HDD, for durability, go with SSD. Although I should add that HDD can handle quite a bit, as long as it doesnt get banged around alot.

 

The harddrive version is better IMO. Performance is much better, you don't need to tweak it to run XP with decent performance and you get 10x the storage capacity. Yes, if you drop your AAO, the harddrive will likely fail while the SSD would probably survive..but if you do happen to drop your AAO, the screen would probably snap of its hinges, the keyboard would be damaged, the plastic case would get cracked and some circuit board might even crack in two... the system would be useless anyway, even if the SSD happened to survive the fall. The harddrive version does have a card reader, so you can always buy a SD card for backup purposes.

The advantages of the SD are: completely silent, slightly lower power draw, less heat, and of course more durable.

 

Thanks. I am tending towards the hard drive, although we bought it to lug around Europe (OK, 'lug' doesn't really seem appropriate a word for something this light!), so durability is important to. I have had several people, including supposed experts tell me that the one with the hard drive should NOT run any faster than the solid state, but that is not what I am seeing. This is a great forum, and as soon as i have time, I will read and learn more. thanks for your patience.

 

The particular SSD used in the AAO has horrible write performance which causes WinXP to sometimes freeze for seconds at a time unless you're willing to tweak it to minimize the number of small, random writes. Poor performance during random writes is a big problem with many SSDs. Only high performance desktop SSD's have excellent write performance but those cost more than the AAO itself.

 

If you are using Windows I would get the HDD version. Windows is not designed for minimal installs and will never live comfortably in that enviroment. Plus the HDD version will let you upload a lot more pictures to the HD so you can take more pictures.

 

I just bought the 8GB SSD version off eBay with a slightly cracked screen for £75 including postage. I'd read that the SSD was slower than the HDD, but my god it's bad :-0 The SSD in my machine is the slower of the two I think, and has very poor write performance. The read performance is nothing to write home about either.

I've installed on my AAO-110 an nLited version of XP (nLite is a programme which allows you to trim bits out of XP, either to make the installation smaller or faster - or both). I've nLited a previous install of XP in exactly the same way and installed it on an old Compaq N410C laptop with a Pentium III CPU running at 1.3GHz and 330MB of RAM, and the Compaq absolutely slaughters the AAO-110 with SSD - it's miiillleess faster in all respects.

When I installed the XP on this AAO-110, I carried out almost all the tweaks suggested on this forum, but at the end of the day, the HDD version is just considerably faster than the SSD. On my HDD AAO-150, I installed my nLited XP in an 8GB partition, having partitioned the HDD so that this 8GB partition was around the periphery of the HDD, where data transfer rates are fastest. I've been very happy with the results in terms of speed, and use the '150 far more for daily computing than I ever thought I would. As long as you don't literally throw your HDD AAO around, the hard drive should be fine. If you have stuff you really can't afforf to use, just back it up on an SD memory card.

Cheers, Jon.

 

End of story: we kept the one with the 80 hard drive, and we are very happy with it so far. It really was much faster than the solid state one. Will post again after our trip to Europe in May: that will really tell the tale! Hard to believe, but a friend gave us a fanny pack that the Acer fits into!!! I think this is how I will carry it when in transit. We too are finding that we are using it more for everyday stuff than we thought we would.

 

XD

 

Sometimes I put the One In my pocket. The side pocket on my pants.
I love how portable it is. Congratulations and good luck with your new One.

 

pages should load at the same speed.... what OS are you running on your SSD AAO? How much RAM? I have SSD version the the pages load just as fast as any of my other PCs and laptops.