Dog slow SSD in Acer atomi aspire one notebook

[Mr_Sukebe]

A relative of mine recently bought a new atom powered Acer aspire one notebook and showed me the unit today.
Not an impressive start, ran like an absolute dog.
I checked the CPU and memory usage, all fine. That inferred that it was the harddrive causing the bottleneck, so plugged in an external USB drive. Sure enough, the external drive was fine.
In short, any reading or writing from the SSD drive is truly abysmal.

Is this normal for Acer SSD notebooks, or do you think that this one is just feeling a little unwell?


Have to say that apart from the drive issue and lack of DVI or HDMI port, looks like a nice unit and would probably be great for net surfing and hosting of Slimserver. Infact I'm so impressed that I'm thinking of buying a Dell 1010 which does have HDMI output. Just want to know whether I go with a unit with SSD or with a 2.5" drive.

 

[Mr_Sukebe]

From a bit of googling, I think I've found the answer.
Apparently the Acer one is notorious for using SSD drives with completely pants performance. If you're considering an Acer, either buy one with a standard hard drive, or buy from a different manufacturer.

 

[DreXeL]

I'm posting this from an 8gb SSD equipped Aspire One. Whilst it's true that the performance of the SSD really is abysmal, it's perfectly fine when using the standard Linux installation and web browsing etc is snappy enough because it doesn't access the drive anywhere near as much as Windows.

That's not to say you can't get acceptable performace in a Windows installation, I'm currently running XP just fine. But to get it to run without running like a one legged dog you have to install the EWF manager and driver from XP Embedded. This diverts all HDD writes to memory, and commits them to the SDD at shut-down. Also a ram upgrade is recommended (it's a bit of a mission to upgrade the ram as there is no door on the underside, you basically have to take the thing apart).

I have 1.5gb in mine and my XP installation with EWF is very snappy indeed, infact I'd say it's better than the original Linux installation now, and just as quick as a mechanical-drive equipped Aspire One.

 

[Mr_Sukebe]

Drex>
VERY useful suggestion. I'll recommend that to my relative.