I recently installed a 64GB SSD in my Aspire One, and I threw Windows 7 on it. I've read that Windows 7 is much better about using SSDs than XP or Vista (rightfully so; this thing is QUICK), but I was wondering if there's anything I should do to cut off background writes to the drive. NTFS is a journaling filesystem, and since that's what 7 is using I wasn't sure if Windows takes care of that or if that's something I should be worried about fixing. And for the curious; Windows 7 on an SSD boots up in about twenty seconds, and shuts down completely in about six or seven. I had Linux installed, but Windows 7 is beating the shit out of it in every regard (speed, battery life, stability [yeah really], etc). Edit: Nevermind, I just found this list.
20 seconds? Hmm, that's a bit disappointing - I've had a standard Vista install boot in 12 seconds on a SATA drive before. Handy list - I was about to suggest several of those. Common sense, really. I find it funny that all of a sudden there are machines like the EEEPC with SSD and Windows, but they don't mention the lifespan of these drives or how taxing Windows and its virtual memory is on them. Do Asus pre-configure the machines so they're not taxing the drive as much, or do they just not care?
To be fair, I didn't actually time it, so I'm not sure how fast it actually boots. I was just throwing out a guess. The drive I'm using supposedly beat a 10k rpm Raptor in read tests. As far as pre-configuring the SSDs that come with netbooks: I know Acer ships their SSD versions with a FAT32 filesystem. Recently I've seen an HP Mini-Note and Asus Eee PC 900 with NTFS. I didn't check to see if they had been modified in any way to accommodate the SSD (they were both to be formatted), but I can tell you they were both slow as shit with nothing installed. I formatted the Eee 900 yesterday with FAT32, and it seems to be faring much better. One of my coworkers brought up the fact that you don't get all of the "features" of NTFS like user permissions and file size limitations, but the guy I did it for isn't going to notice any of that. It's just going to be faster to him.
SSDs aren't always faster than "regular" HDDs mind you. It depends on the type of the SSD as well as the size of the files that are handled, and naturally the filesystem too. In many instances, regular drives have been proven to be quicker. For more information, google and wikipedia are your friends.
The new SSDs are improving, especially when it comes to both reading and writing speeds at the same time. Memory controllers are improving (since SSD is basically like a RAM card, so it needs a memory controller) to effectively store data and retrieve it.
I've read it's 100,000, with 32MB per GB in spare to cope with block write failures, and the flash chips have some kind of scheme where they don't write to the same block over and over again. Either way you can install the OS to the SD slot if things fuck up completely.
If you can install an OS to the SD card, I'm pretty sure it requires a fair amount of trickery. No netbook I've seen supports booting from SD, which is unfortunate. It would be extremely useful. When I had my Eee PC, I just installed the root Linux files to the SSD and left /home on the SD card. It seemed to work pretty well considering how little space I had. And yeah, wear-leveling has gotten much better over the few years this technology has been out. The SSD I bought is *rated* to last over 150 years, although I'll be quite happy if it lasts for fifteen. I think it's especially fascinating how blocks that are to be deleted are only flagged for such and not actually removed until new data is ready to be written over them.
I used a CF card as a SSHD on the first netbooks back in the day, the Toshiba Libretto series and so far running Windows 98 and it's still working fine....
Even if the BIOS doesn't, you should be able to rig GRUB to do it. I'm pretty confident I've seen people talking about having successfully installed different distros on different swappable SD cards, anyway.
You're right, because that just happened to me by accident... I left my SD card in the Aspire One and tried to throw Linux on it; wound up formatting the SD card by accident, and from then on it showed up in my GRUB options. Good stuff.
I installed Linux (a few different distros) on my Aspire One due to putting the SSD in. I must've accidentally installed it to my SD card, which I left in the slot, because it showed up as a boot option under GRUB. I didn't actually test it to see if it worked, though, just because I didn't care.
GRUB = boot loader. People have been making bootable pen drives for a while, so I don't see why you shouldn't be able to boot off SD.
Pretty much any BIOS within the past few years supports booting from USB, but SD cards are a different story. I've always wondered if putting an SD card in a USB adapter would boot, though.
Depends on the memory controller chip for the SD card slot as well as the BIOS. My Epox board, when I put an SD memory card in or even my USB thumb drive (sandisk), it notifies me that the boot configuration has been changed. So, I have to press F1 to continue. But my friend's Emachine that has the mem card readers do not show anything in the boot device selection screen.
This used to blow my mind too.. but I recalled how long it takes during defragging and complete formatting for data to be completely erased... Imagine having to do that every time you wanted to delete something! The "flagged" deletion is convenient in the short term, definitely.
sorry to break the news but even PCs don't delete things (in windows) right out, it's just flagged that way. Same as when you "cut" a file and paste it elsewhere, it's just an address change, not a physical address change. That's what filesystems are for amongst other things!
You're talking about what NTFS/FAT32 or whatever do; SSDs flag for later deletion at a much lower level.
