solid state drive vs. hard drive?

All depends on what you want to use it for. a solid state drive uses very little electricity, so you should see better battery life. a ss drive is more durable (no mechanical heads to crash) so it is great in abusive enviroonments.

But a ss drive is only 8gig, as another pointed out is very small

With the Acer Aspire (One), it depends what You want to do with it since it's completely portable, and designed to be lightweight.

For the benefits of the SSD at 8Gigs ;

1) It's a VERY small hard drive and can be backed up completely onto a new flasdhdrive with backup software, which would take up some space to keep installed of course.

2) It's a fast technology, although it will still be faster than XP in general and the RAM anyway.

3) It's much faster and simpl;er to recover with the same hardware if there is a virus problem, from a flashdrive image, but more difficult to recover Your own files from in a virus incident if there;s no recent enough backup done.

The benefits of the 160Gig drive (My choice too) ;

1) It's a huge hard drive, and will store anything You need to have installed, including a Vista upgrade when there's a version stable enough and made for lower-media hardware (which is just so anti-Vista in design).

2) It's a standardized SATA hard drive, which means the connector will take another standardized SATA hard drive. This is useful for several reasons, including swapping out drives between travel and secured data You don;t wnat to lose in case of theft, or switching between entertainment and work trips, or Vista and Linux, and XP as Your needs change.

3) It's replaceable in case of a virus with a cheaper than SSD hard drive, which will probably be 1.5terabytes available in the next 3 months (SATA).

4) It can be divided into many more partition for file organizations and archivings, or password protecting an entire partition.

Good luck!.

While SSD technology is certainly the future, its current cost/MB is too high for general use. However, with prices falling 50%-80% per year on SSD products, it wont be long until its the best choice.

Between those two choices, the 160gb hdd is the way to go. I have never seen anyone with a modern computer use less than 8gb, especially if they download any mp3s, videos, or do work on it. If performance is something you need right now, there are 64gb and 128gb SSD drives that are lightning quick, but expect to pay up to $500 for that extra performance.

hope that helps,

Scott

http://www.fireflykeyboards.com/

Technical Department

solid state drives are faster and more durable, and use less power then hard drives. They are basically like large inbuilt usb flash drives.

However solid state drives cost alot more money per gb right now then hard drives. If you are just going to use it just for internet, a alot of traveling, or for a child. Then I would get the one with the solid state drive

If you want it to store videos, pictures, and music.. Then I would get the hard drive.

A solid state drive is MUCH faster than a regular hard drive because it's like running from flash memory. Unfortunately, 8 GB is not a lot and I would go for the 160 GB hard drive.

get a 160gb. 8gb is way too small. a solid state has one advantage too. it has no moving parts so theoretically it has an almost instantaneous read speed... but this depends on the rest of the computers hardware. you need to get an hd to actually store things. if you want a nice computer with a ssd there is always the macbook air

well if you can shell the money, you can get the best of both worlds by using the 8GB as an extremely fast cache or boot drive, and the 160 GB drive for storage.

but if you had to choose one the 160GB is better because you need HD space to anything.

The solid state would also save your battery a LOT. Spinning a hard drive takes (relatively) a lot of power.

If you are going to use it mostly not plugged in, get the solid state, and if you need more, get a SD card or USB stick. They go up to 32GB these days.

If it will be mostly stationary, i.e. plugged in to the AC power supply, get the hard drive.

I'd get a regular hard drive.

8 GB is a pittance of storage.

SSD is an interesting concept (no moving parts), but you have to be practical, too. In these days of digital music, movies, and pictures, 8 GB just isn't enough.

hard drive 160 gb is better!

solid state drive's write speed is much slower, it uses much power too.

and btw, 160gb is much more than 8gb