Netbook Upgrade

Having disposable cash again is really nice, and I was finally able to pick up some new stuff from newegg after taking care of school expenses.

So I grabbed a Solid State hard-disk for my netbook, which so far is pretty awesome. It's been on my todo list for quite a while, especially since i carry the netbook around almost everywhere so sooner or later it's going to take enough abuse to wreck a spinning drive.

Vertex SSD

The drive's read and write times are considerably faster than the 5400rpm drive that was in the machine initially, and faster than the 7200rpm WD black drive in my thinkpad for everything except sequential read times.

On top of the speed, the machine is now silent unless i'm pushing the process load high enough to get the fan running, and the power saving has bought me about an extra hour and a half of battery life (battery life was down to about 6 and some change hours after a year of use, now it's over 7 and a half). The battery life is one of the most important features in a netbook to me, since the whole point of a netbook is portability and carrying around a power cord / needing to find an outlet detracts from that.

Along with the ssd I bumped the memory up to 2gigs, which is handy since I've playing around a lot with tmpfs file systems in gentoo and that means eating up ram. The system it's self rarely uses more than 200MB it's self, but it's nice having over a gig of memory for those tmpfs file systems.

For the old 5400rpm drive, waste not want not, I bought a cheap as dirt external enclosure.
It's a simple aluminum case with a sata to usb interface, I wedged a couple business cards between the top of the drive and the case on the backside to keep it from rattling at all. For a 10 buck enclosure, I'm happy with it.

Now I'm almost done with a clean install on the new drive, and it feels almost like a new machine.

For more info about running gentoo on netbooks, some of my config information is here