How much fun is an SSD based Laptop?
Simple answer: lots of fun.
Actually, even more so than I thought it would be. The solid state drive in the eeePC clearly isn’t there to improve performance (depending on the design, flash drives can seriously outperform traditional hard disks). It’s much more a matter of size (flash is tiny) and robustness. And the ability to simply move the eeePC without a second thought is really useful when at a conference. You can walk around with the computer while it’s running, you can tilt it, drop it (oops, stupid me) and there’s no risk to your data. Pretty amazing.
I don’t think I can make an argument that going to an SSD-based laptop is worth the amazing one thousand dollar price difference that you pay with Apple’s MacBook Air (compared to the regular disk). But from what I understand outrageous price deltas will soon be a thing of the past, anyway. Prices for flash are coming down fast and more and more SSDs are being offered. And more and more SSD-based laptops are coming to the mainstream market. For example the Toshiba R500, the Fujitsu P1620 or the yet-to-be-officially-announced Lenovo Thinkpad X300. And in the case of the Toshiba and the Fujitsu, the price delta is much more reasonable (though still a little steep for my liking). Certainly in both cases more than the price for an eeePC…
Oh and the other thing that I noticed with the eeePC? It’s really easy to live with 12G of “disk” space. I use the internal 4G and an 8G SDHC card and have yet to get even close to filling up the space - even though I have two OSs installed in a dual boot setup. So I wouldn’t be too worried that the mainstream ultra portable notebooks I mention above come with “only” 32G or 64G of SSD.
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I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?
