8gb SSD or 120gb HDD

Greetings.
Ever since I first saw the aspire one irl, I've been madly in love. But one of its most attractive points, for me, is the ssd - because its a *solid state* drive! Its just cool!

And since I'm getting one from my gf for christmas, I've been reading up on it. But now I'm pretty worried at the horror stories, I've been reading regarding the speed (or lack of) of the ssd.

I will use the aa1 for studying, surfing the web and tweaking. I usually have loads of tabs open, and like to stream music while I'm writing a paper. I also love to play around with any OS I use. So my question is - ssd or hdd?

Price is not an issue, as a local store is having the 120gb on sale for, almost, the same price as the ssd.

 

Hi

Firstly it's very possible to speed up the ssd just read here in the forums about how to do it....

But personaly I prefer hard drive to ssd as at least with a hard drive you start with 120gigs of space compared to 16gigs and if want more space(HD) you can simple just buy a bigger drive for very little if you require even more storage(seen 320gig for £32)...

Look at it like this 120gig is say 1000 albums or 200 films depending on compression.. and this still allows space for the OS etc.. So if you require more you just buy and install a BIGGER drive..

As I understand the biggest SSD is 32gig(may be wrong)... I also think it easier to install a Hard drive.. I also have been lead to believe installing a different OS is a little easier on the HD version, SO if this is something you wish to do the may be SSD is not the way to go...(my opinion)

Going back to storage think of it another way... As time goes on you will fill the ssd up(and you know you will) so will start having to delete/remove software,data, music/films and photos etc where as the HD version will take a lot longer thus allowing you to simply keep more data etc to hand longer...

For the etc money I'd go HD it's worth it in the end.


regards
Andrew

 

Well of course for space, you can beat the hdd. But I'm used to a 40gb standard laptop, which is the same as I would get with the 8gb ssd + 32gb sd card.

But I just love the idea of really fast boot time. This is where the ssd really comes into its own. But what I'm worried about is the write speed. Say I want to install one of the open source fps games. With a write speed of only 5mb/s, it would take a long time to install a game of ~500mb (over 8min?).

And what about torrent downloads? Will the slow writing speed of the ssd affect general system performance if I'm downloading a large video at 1mb/s?

I would also like to try Linpus, although I will definitly switch to the upcoming Ubuntu netbook distro eventually. I'm generally not dependent on Windows, but if I for some reason did need it, I'm toying with the idea of installing and running xp from a usb thum drive.

Finally, I think the aa1 looses some of its appeal with the 120gb xp version. With the ssd running Linpus, and the sdhc slot serving as memory expansion, it just seems like a complete and sleek package. With a regular hd is there really any point to the sdhc slot?

 

In Vista and XP Pro I think, you can get a driver to make the SD slot a HDD rather than FDD, then make a dynamic spanned volume encompassing both...

 

It's all preference. I went with the SSD because I knew it would be bouncing around since I use it mainly for college, so not having to worry about a hard drive failing was a big thing for me. I have a desktop and a full size laptop, so storage wasn't an issue.