Brian Jarvis, UMPC Geek

A few months ago, IT at work upgraded the hard drive in my Lenovo T61 to an Intel solid state drive (SSD).  The difference in performance was amazing – it was the largest performance difference I have ever seen in a single upgrade.  From boot times to sorting email in Outlook, everything was suddenly faster.  The speed at which my laptop responds makes the computer a joy to use.  Ever since the upgrade, I have wondered what difference an SSD would make in my netbook.

I may be crazy for wanting to put an SSD that cost as much as the computer into my netbook, but I have always wondered if the upgrade experience on my T61 could be replicated.  Would the lightweight processor in the netbook cancel any benefit from the faster I/O?  Could a person justify spending that much on an upgrade for their netbook?  Well, yesterday I got to find out when  I got my hands on an Intel X25-M 160GB SSD to play with.

It almost killed me to not rip my netbook open to install it, but I had to practice some patience in order to get some baseline performance info for my system with the native 120GB hard drive.  To get some subjective data, I timed how long it took for the system to boot from a powered off state and open a text file I had placed in the startup folder.  I then placed shortcuts for a word document, an Excel spreadsheet, and Visual Studio 2008 in the startup folder, logged off, and then back on.  The first test took 54 seconds and the second test took 31 seconds with the hard drive.

In our lab at work, we have a hard drive duplicating device that does a bit-by-bit copy of hard drives.  I slaved in the SSD and made an exact copy of my hard drive (dual boot operating systems, temp files, data, and all).  I then installed the SSD into my Aspire One and reran the tests.  This time the boot took 47 seconds and the application launch took 24 seconds.  The improvement was 13% and 22% respectively. 

The netbook goes to sleep from Windows 7 faster than a worn out gamer after a two day LAN party.  It’s tough to get a good time, but it seems to sleep in just about three seconds and resumes in just more than four.  It seems so much faster than the hard drive based system that it feels like instant-on!

Anecdotally, the system feels quite a bit faster.  It takes about 10 seconds to launch iTunes and parse my larger than average library, only about 3 seconds to open a two page document in Word, and some very small fraction of a second to open “My Documents.”  I don’t have anything empirical to compare it against, but it feels significantly faster than before. 

Now, to get to the question of whether or not I think the upgrade is worth it.  Honestly, probably not in a netbook (although certainly worth it in a full laptop) but I want to spend a couple of days forming a full opinion.  I can say for sure that I didn’t see the huge leap forward in performance that I noticed on the T61, so the processor is definitely a big part of the equation.   There are benefits to consider beyond raw performance such as battery life and durability that will certainly need to be considered though.  For a device that was designed to be small enough to take everywhere with you, these could be important factors.  I’ll try to weigh in after a few days to tell you what I think.