8GB SSD or 120GB Hard Drive

Numbers are great and all, but I'm a lot more interested in how it feels. If it's way sluggish to use, that's pretty bad, but if it feels snappy still, I don't really care about the raw speeds. This isn't going to be a file server.

 

The installed Linux versions feels fast and responsive enough. Notice that the SSD is slow when writing, while it has normal speed while reading and pretty good seek times. So as long as you are mainly reading things from disk it's fast.

A default Windows which uses the disk to swap, writes eventlogs and has the indexing service on will of cause be slow. Tune it, disable all the little background things you don't need and it's should be good enough (but consider adding more memory).

It depends what you want to do with it. If you want to use it as a file/webserver, a torrent client or a database server you should consider buying something different. Use it for what it's designed for and you are fine!

 

I have been in contact with Acer Sweden today regarding this matter and here is the reply I received:

"The slow speed, when using XP, is due to incompatible drivers, thats why we only sell Acer One and XP with a mechanical HDD. SDD and Linux works just great."

 

Hahaha good find sir! Now time to get those XP drivers in check lol

 

According to the person I spoke to a dedicated "Aspire One Site" with drivers, software etc. will be up and running sometime in August.

 

What we need is some SSD benchmarks on Linux. That way we can verify if it's a windows driver issue or not. Maybe Acer Sweden is blowing smoke?

 

I am definitely getting the linux version - but I'm still not sure about which hard drive. The 8 gigs should be plenty of storage my purposes - which one would you recommend based on other attributes?

Also - how is flash player working on the linux version - I have an older laptop with Ubuntu & I had to disable flash to surf quickly. Does anyone have any direct experience with the linux aspire one?


Thanks alot
Tammy

 

Capacity is the biggest disadvantage of SSD. If you can live with the 8GB limit, and are sticking with Linux, I'd recommend SSD mostly for purposes of physical robustness. Performance-wise, you're not likely to notice a major difference between the two. A lot of SSD users (myself included) like to perform certain optimizations to reduce the amount of continuous writing that gets done to the SSD (to prolong life), but with the current state of the technology it's debatable whether that's at all necessary.

 

I don't think it's necessary to prolong the lifetime of the SSD but it probably does speed things up a bit. Flash is usually much slower at writing than reading so reducing unnecessary writes should help the overall speed.

 

Can you tell me what do you do to perform the optimization to the ssd?

 

Ran swapless (with upgraded physical RAM), modified fstab to add the noatime flag to the SSD's mount options, added fstab entries to mount /tmp, /var/tmp, and /var/log to tmpfs (this will cause all logs to be cleared at every reboot), and turned off Firefox's cache-to-disk. Might have been more... that's what I can think of off-hand.

(EDIT: Oh, and I used ext2 instead of ext3. Might not be acceptable for some who rely on the journaling.)

 

I'm tuning my Linpus system, i don't wanto to reinstall another. Is better ext2? I'm italian and i don't know if i understand what you say (sorry for my english). You say that ext2 is better than ext3 but the Journal say the opposite?

Ok for the other operation. With this operation you can see an increasing of performance?

 

Ext3 is favorable in general because of its journaling, which helps protect you against data loss and long consistency checks if your machine powers off unexpectedly. However, the process of journaling produces a LOT of writing to the storage medium. In the case of flash-based storage, which can't stand up to as many writes as a hard drive, this will cause a lot of wear to the drive. Therefore a lot of people prefer to use ext2 on flash media.

That's really what most of the modifications I mentioned are for... reducing writes, rather than improving performance. However, since these drives have a fairly low write-speed, there are probably small performance benefits. The exception is running swapless, which would have a negative impact on performance if I ran a bunch of memory-intensive apps. For that reason, I upgraded my RAM on my EeePC, and plan to do so on my Aspire One once I decide to buy one.

(Edit: small semantic correction; changed "flash-based memory" to "flash-based storage".)

 

thank you very much. When i decide to buy some ram, i go to swapless mode

 

There's one more disadvantage to running swapless that you should be aware of... you won't be able to hibernate (suspend-to-disk). Sleep (suspend-to-RAM) will work fine.

 

Journalling does remove the need to run fsck after a crash but unfortunately it does not protect against data loss. That being the case the advantages of ext3 are really quite small since Linux doesn't crash at all often.

I normally run ext3 but in the case of a low-powered machine like the One, using ext2 instead of ext3 is worthwhile, particularly as writes to flash memory tend to be quite a bit slower than reads.

 

Good catch. I wasn't thinking very hard when I wrote that sentence.

 

As far as I can see, Linpus only offers an option to go to Sleep, is there a hibernation mode? Not that it matters much, when it takes under 20 seconds to boot, but I was wondering.

 

On the swap, assuming the hardware is compatible with Linux hibernate at all (thus noting the lack of the hibernate option as someone mentioned, on Linpus), it's quite possible on Linux to set the system up not to enable swap normally, then turn it on immediately before hibernate and off immediately after using an appropriate hibernate script. What Linpus can or can't do I don't know, but I'll be loading Gentoo on mine so what Linpus does or doesn't do won't matter, at least here.