A few weeks ago I picked up a 2.5″ Patriot SATA 32GB Solid State Drive (SSD) intending to use it in a netbook. The reasoning – it was under $100 at Fry’s after a mail-in rebate (and because I had wanted one for a while). It’s got a read of up to 175MB/s and a write speed of up to 100MB/s. Keep in mind these are MLC drives (possibly still based on the Microns), hence the cheaper costs versus the much faster SLCs. It’s hard to beat for the price, especially given that it’s going into a netbook (in this case, a 10.2″ Lenovo S10).
You can find the same drive at Amazon for under $100 after a rebate. I also happened to have a 2.5″ SATA 320GB Western Digital Scorpio drive (down to $77 at Amazon).
Last week, a Microsoft executive mentioned that 16GB would make for “a good Windows 7 experience” when it came to SSDs and netbooks and that Windows 7 would need around 8GB of install space.
Since I’m doing some testing for an offline project involving Windows 7, I decided to put those claims to the test, as well as do some very unscientific benchmarking with the SSD. Note: This is not really a test of Windows 7 – I plan on doing that in the future. I will say that so far Windows 7 has impressed me and Microsoft is definitely doing it right this time. I’ve loaded no drivers (although everything was picked up by Windows from what I can see) nor have I changed any settings. Rather this is a test of a budget SSD versus a similarly priced conventional HDD under similar conditions.
I’ve posted the benchmarks below (click “Read More” if you don’t see them).
Oh, as far as drive space required, the Microsoft executive was right (this is after an install, but with no optimizations or anything):
There were several major CPU-related announcements for netbooks released over the past few days, along with some more information about dual-core Atoms and how they might potentially fare in netbooks.