Power, perhaps. And given the small size, it is indeed a good thing to have an external storage.
But the question is: is it worth having the SSD over the HDD, seeing as I could just swap out the SSD for an HDD I have, giving me 120 GB of storage, or should one have to purchase an external storage to go along with the SSD?
Is it worth the extra cost?
Originally Posted by Adak
> SSD uses less power, which is a good thing.
Not in some cases. Those some cases being netbooks...
Several benchmarks on the net have showen they have worse power consumption.
I have seen that also. I suppose they average out close to that of HDDs, so power consumption isn't really a part of the equation.
If you were using an SSD, wouldn't you be running Linux which is smaller, so you wouldn't need as much space as you would for Windows?
I don't know if it's even safe to use Windows with an SSD since Windows is constantly doodling on the hard drive, even when the system is idle. Eventually all those writes would start breaking the SSD...
"I am probably the laziest programmer on the planet, a fact with which anyone who has ever seen my code will agree." - esbo, 11/15/2008
"the internet is a scary place to be thats why i dont use it much." - billet, 03/17/2010
There are guides for optimizing Windows XP for use on SSDs (forget Vista). Basically, turn off page while, use ram disks or get rid of cache, and it should severely minimize number of writes.
But there was another solution, too, when I looked, so I think it will be OK.
Windows 7 will be further optimized for netbooks, so... I think it's safe. No horror stories as of yet, that I have heard.
Because netbooks have only gotten SSD for a few months. Not enough time for horror stories to come out.
SSDs have been around for a long time.
not in netbooks.
I believe they use cheaper variants (sorry I don't know much about them), since I don't believe they will be using $500 SSDs in $300 netbooks.
That's 100% the reason why I avoided SSDs. However, I was considering swapping it for a HDD (provided it's a 2.5" SATA/IDE drive) and using the SSD for backups -- ie an external enclosure.
Yes, I imagine they used the cheaper SSDs... they could not very well put a $300 drive in a notebook and expect it to gobble up half of the price.
Guess it's just a waiting game, then? To see if any horror stories pops up...
They probably won't ... because people just go "oh a HDD is $40, I'll just wack one in"
Anyway the Wind has plenty of horsepower for what I want to do, people even play games on them -- http://wiki.msiwind.net/index.php/Windows_Game including HL2, Doom 3 etc. Oh well back to compiling kernel modules :s. Not to mention installing XP from USB was an adventure!
Well that wasn't bad...
2 days to fully setup everything, including
* Ram upgrade (I now have 2GB)
* Reinstall XP from USB (Very hard!) -- as it comes with XP Home and some weird hard drive partitioning
* Build my Arch Linux system including wireless, which wasn't hard at all
Anyway, for sharing a partition between Linux and Windows what's the best way? I've used the ntfs-3g driver ever since write support but that's kinda lame. Or the ext2/ext3 driver for windows? Then a virus could potentially write to my Linux partition -- not good!
Or FAT but no-one likes that...
For me I use samba on another computer... seems to be the cleanest solution (if you have a spare comp lying around...)
I guess the next best thing would be NTFS + ntfs-3g.
There is a ext2 driver for Windows (mounts ext3 as ext2), but I don't think it has received nearly as much attention as ntfs-3g, and I don't know about its quality.
I've used the ext2 driver for Windows, it's very good as far as I could tell. However I only used it in quick bursts, ie to fix my /boot partitionmuch faster than a live CD when windows steals the boot flag and I need to add it to grub.
Before the days of ntfs-3g I did use FAT... but it doesn't work that well (for example sym links). Thanks for the info, perhaps I'll just use ntfs-3g (and thus FUSE -- oh noes more memory usage!) or stick with FAT32 until I have problems.
I'm not sure if NTFS supports symlinks, does it?
The problem with FAT32 for me is the max file size of 4GB. I sometimes have to handle files larger than that.
