[geeks] Those new mini-notebooks

[Nadine Miller]

On Sep 8, 2008, at 4:04 PM, Joshua Boyd wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 08, 2008 at 04:01:03PM -0700, Nadine Miller wrote:
>> Josh said SD, not SSD, though, so not sure if that's where he was
>> going or not.
>>
>> For me, since I'd likely be at least dual booting the box (Acer's
>> forum has an extensive thread about OS X on the Aspire One), I would
>> also go with the hard drive rather than SSD.  If I was giving it to a
>> teenager or someone who is more rough on their portables, I'd  
>> probably
>> go SSD.
>>
>> As for SD, apparently some of the systems automatically "append" or
>> "merge" or transparently mount the SD cards so they just look like a
>> part of the "userland" file system.  Based on the thread in the Acer
>> forum where I read that, there are some inconsistencies in the OS as
>> well as the hardware as Nate mentioned.
>
> Yes, I really meant SD, as a secondary drive.  Presumably the primary
> boot drive is some other sort of SSD on models like the Mini9.
>
> The merging sounds like a bad idea.

Yeah, I thought so too.  I haven't really poked around more in other  
forums for other mini laptops to see if that's common or just some  
weird mis-configuration.  A couple of the folks in the Aspire One OS X  
thread mentioned it, though I can't recall if it was under XP or Linux.

I think so long as you are using name brand SD, you'd probably be OK  
performance-wise.  Obviously, you could purchase "faster" flash such  
as high-end photographers use, but I'm not sure that the cost would be  
worth the performance boost in a laptop.

I used Linux (SDL, iirc) off of a flash drive as a "leave no trace"  
set up on my Windows box at last $job as well as on some public  
computers, and while I noticed some slow down, I found it pretty  
useable over all.  That said, I wouldn't want to do anything that  
required moving big files ("big" meaning multi-GB) around using flash,  
though.  Sustained write speeds seem to be the worst on SD and other  
flash IMO.

=Nadine=