[plug] trying to buy a linux netbook (fwd)

[William Kenworthy]

> Don't know about the "Acer eM250 eMachines Netbook ", but from 
> experience (twice) and from forum discussions I'd leave SSDs a very wide 
> berth.  Apart from their unreliability they're slow, expensive and use 
> absolutely no less power.  The Linux based machines tend to have SSDs 
> and less RAM.  The Wintendo based machines tend to have more RAM and 
> real hard drives - 160gb+.
> 
> Check out some of the problems with SSDs here abd other sections of the 
> same forum.  I'd bet that the Asus forums are much the same wrt SSDs.
> http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=54
> 
> Cheers
> Kev
> 

Keep in mind that many of the reports come from windows users, earlier
versions of which are not optimised for SSD's.

SSD's require fiddly tuning including the proper choices for
filesystems, options and ancilliary care (e.g., "trim")

The most popular controller (i.e., cheap!) built into SSD's are
apparently the ones with the highest failure rates.

Properly setup, they can be blazenly fast (e.g., TuxOnIce suspend writes
to disk) from some of the reports Ive seen.  Reliability is an issue,
but I think that will improve once the technology is widespread, and the
"duds" leave the market.

BillK