Should I buy an SSD for my netbook?

[decoherence]

I have a Lenovo S9e with a built-in 4GB SSD. There is also space for a SATA drive and I was using an old 80GB HDD that was a spare from work. That drive was needed so now I'm stuck with 4GB again.

What I didn't particularly like about the 80GB drive was the noise, the heat and the fact that I want to be able to close the netbook's lid and toss it in a bag without having to wait for it to finish suspending and spinning down the disk.

My concerns about SSDs mainly have to do with performance. I understand that the new ones are theoretically in the same ballpark as HDDs... what I'm concerned about is this occasional few-second freeze I hear about. How occasional is it? This is more a problem with some drives than others?

I'm hoping to find a 64GB somewhere in the $200 (Canadian) range. This one caught my eye http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=38191&vpn=FM-25S2S-64GBF1&manufacture=G.Skill&promoid=1192 but if anyone can recommend anything or has any advice, I'd love to hear it!

thanks,

[rannable]

hey, www.pcwb.com are the cheapest i find, i think they should have a US equivalent too...

[decoherence]

hey, www.pcwb.com are the cheapest i find, i think they should have a US equivalent too...

Thanks for the link. I should've said in the original post that, if people want to suggest retailers, please Canadian ones only. I'm not interested in paying customs.

ADD: actually, that's not fair to other readers. OK, post good deals from wherever! ;) a few for Canadian retailers wouldn't go wrong, either.

[adzik]

Regarding performance of SSDs over conventional drives, there may be a slight difference, but I don't think it's something that should stop you from using one. I assume you're not running a critical server on your netbook. :)
My understanding is that a different filesystem may improve the performance, but I don't have an SSD to test this.
Here is some information on this. http://robert.penz.name/137/no-swap-partition-journaling-filesystem-on-a-ssd/

Later on if you're feeling adventurous, you can test the NILFS filesystem out, but I don't know how stable it is.
http://www.nilfs.org/
http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7345/1.html

[adzik]

oh, and by the way, here is a link to a cheap 64GB SSD.
They have a few others, but not many left in stock (and it's Canadian-since I live here too :))
http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=023919&cid=990.545
They generally have the lowest prices I have found for just about anything.

[gn2]

Avoid any SSD that has a JMicron chip.
Look for an OCZ Vertex.

[drawkcab]

I have a super talent ssd in my eeepc. It didn't cost much and it works surprisingly well. The prices on a basic ssd should be going down soon.