• Netbook + SSD = worth it?
    11 replies, posted
Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3 Corsair Value Select 1 x 2 GB Intel X25-V Value SATA Solid-State Drive 40 GB Total price; $580 / €445 I'm going to use it for studying, browsing the web, anything that's not power intense, and I was wondering if the SSD would really be worth it. My idea of getting the SSD was for saving power and decreasing load times, and for storage I'd get a 16GB or larger flash drive. [B]Edit:[/B] Also I might install crunchbang linux on it. Should I partition up the SSD for 2x 20GB and install Linux on one, and Windows on the other?
Just keep linux on it, no need to partition it or install Windows.
Well I use a netbook for college and it has a Normal Hard drive, it still has something like 7+ hours of battery and I don't notice slow loading times. I would say that it's not worth it for the SSD unless you want just that little bit extra.
SSD certainly isn't worth it. If anything just get a 6 cell battery. Much cheaper solution. If you can't handle the additional bulk, just deal with the already superb battery life. Pretty safe assumption you aren't getting it for speed. If so, bear in mind, netbooks aren't made for speed.
The laptop's got a 6-cell battery already, and perhaps you're right it's not worth it. What linux is most userfriendly though?
[QUOTE=tobolateV2;24866228](...) I would say that it's not worth it for the SSD unless you want just that little bit extra.[/QUOTE] An SSD is not a "little bit" extra (concerning speed). Its a shitload extra. Even on a netbook the bottleneck is still the storage. @OP: Go with the SSD if you really need the speed. I just can speak for myself because I like my SSD (Windows boots in 15 seconds instead of in 50 and every program in below 1 second). But you won't gain much for powersaving. Sure, it just takes around 75 mW to 150 mW (a 2.5'' mobile drive takes around 1-2W) but the real juicesuckers are the display and CPU. But if you decide to get an SSD, it has to be partitioned with the filesystem clusters matching the erase-blocks (aligned) or your write-speed may drop to half the real speed. Background is, every block (e.g. 4 kB) has to be deleted before even a bit can be written to them. If you have bad alignment, two blocks have to be deleted and rewritten if you change anything in the cluser, because the cluster spans over both eraseblocks.
[QUOTE=Tools;24867639]What linux is most userfriendly though?[/QUOTE] Ubuntu
I too vouch for SSD's being worth it. Don't knock it 'till you try it.
I have an Asus 1005HA with a 250GB HDD, and it still gets ~5.5 hours after one year's use (it got 7.5-8 hours when I first got it). I have an 80GB windows partition, a 60GB Snow Leopard partition, and a 60GB Ubuntu partition, along with a 30GB shared partition and an 8GB backup Leopard partition. All 3 OS's take less than a minute to boot (well, if Windows would boot right now, it would take less than a minute, my bootloader somehow fucked up my Windows MBR) You would probably get quicker load times, but $600 for a netbook just doesn't seem worth it. I got my netbook for $340, and I got a $60 2GB RAM stick. It may be more worth it to find a netbook with an SSD already installed in it?
SSD it is then. Any particular SSD? I wanted the super-past crucial 120GB, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to hook up a SATA 6Gbit/s to the netbook's SATAII 3Gbit/s, if it's compatible.
Generally the SSD with SATA III should be compatible to a SATA II port.
I just got a netbook with a 40GB SSD. It jacked up the price by $120 but a) my parents paid for it and b) I think it will be awesome booting into Ubuntu in seconds on startup.
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