Asus eee pc 701 or 900?

[olskar]

Hi,
I am planning to buy one of these for school, can someone help me decide? :)

The difference in price here in Sweden is only 39,33 GBP or 68,29 USD.

I will only use it for writing and a little music and some surfing.

Since I will bring it on the train, good batterytime is important to me.

Finally it is important that Ubuntu works good on it ;) Which one of them will work best with Ubuntu?


Thanks!

[wolfen69]

the important thing is how much drive space you have. you will need at least 4 gigs to run ubuntu. mine is the 2 gig version and i had to do a minimal install of debian if i wanted a "real" os on it.

[der_joachim]

Buy the 900. It has a bigger screen and better storage. If you have the money, buy a 901. It is comparable to the 900, but it has a better battery and a faster and more economical processor.

Have fun! :)

[olskar]

Ah I see, then the 701 is not an alternative with it's 4gb harddrive! Thanks!

[olskar]

Buy the 900. It has a bigger screen and better storage. If you have the money, buy a 901. It is comparable to the 900, but it has a better battery and a faster and more economical processor.

Have fun! :)

Ah I see :) No, I don't have that kind of money right now, differs a lot between the 900 and 901 :)

Anyone knows the real batterytime on the 900? Is it 2 - 2,5 hours like they say or less?

[mintochris]

Its only about 1hour 45 to 2 hours with the 4400mAh battery that ships in the UK, but there are asian retailers on ebay selling 10400mAh batteries that last for closer to 6 hours for only £30, I can vouch for those batteries too :D

[der_joachim]

Ah I see :) No, I don't have that kind of money right now, differs a lot between the 900 and 901 :)

Anyone knows the real batterytime on the 900? Is it 2 - 2,5 hours like they say or less?

After some tweaking you get close to what 'they' say. Just do not do any heavy duty stuff like games or movies.

[olskar]

After some tweaking you get close to what 'they' say. Just do not do any heavy duty stuff like games or movies.

Thanks guys! I have it reserved and will collect it tomorrow!

Hope https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24/+bug/182489 will be solved :)

[HermanAB]

I've been using a 701 for the past year or so, but if I would buy one now, I'd get a 901. The few extra pixels will come in handy sometimes.

[zaivala]

I'm not sure about the 900, but the 901 has an Atom processor, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix is supposed to be optimized for that processor. The 701 has an older VIA processor, and I'm still trying to find out if Ubuntu Netbook Remix will run on it.

[zaivala]

Its only about 1hour 45 to 2 hours with the 4400mAh battery that ships in the UK, but there are asian retailers on ebay selling 10400mAh batteries that last for closer to 6 hours for only £30, I can vouch for those batteries too :D

I bought one of those, and they are overrated. Both batteries I own last about the same length of time, and the Asian battery often does not synch in properly, meaning I boot up and down in one swell foop.

[jespdj]

I'm not sure about the 900, but the 901 has an Atom processor, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix is supposed to be optimized for that processor.
The 900 has an Intel Celeron processor which uses more power and is a lot slower than the Intel Atom processor in the 901. The 901 will be faster and the battery will last longer.

[joebodo]

I'm not sure about the 900, but the 901 has an Atom processor, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix is supposed to be optimized for that processor. The 701 has an older VIA processor, and I'm still trying to find out if Ubuntu Netbook Remix will run on it.

I have both a 701 and a 900 - Netbook remix runs just fine on both.

[snowpine]

I just purchased the new model 900ha. It does have the Atom processor. What sets it apart from the others is the 160gb hard drive. Now, I don't really need that much storage space on a netbook; 8 or 16gb would be plenty for my purposes. But the reason I went with the HDD instead of SSD is speed--the SSDs in the lower priced netbooks (such as the 900A they're selling at Best Buy) is ridiculously slow.

ps Netbook Remix runs well.

[noremac]

Netbook Remix runs fine on a 701. Thats what I am using as right now as a matter of fact. However, transitions from the menus can be slow. Not sure if its worth it to me yet and may end up going back to Xubuntu

[Onyros]

I just purchased the new model 900ha. It does have the Atom processor. What sets it apart from the others is the 160gb hard drive. Now, I don't really need that much storage space on a netbook; 8 or 16gb would be plenty for my purposes. But the reason I went with the HDD instead of SSD is speed--the SSDs in the lower priced netbooks (such as the 900A they're selling at Best Buy) is ridiculously slow.

ps Netbook Remix runs well.How slow are the SSD's really? Where can I find solid information regarding that? I'm asking because I have a 701 and Arch boots in 15 seconds from it, disk operations are truly fast, so I'd like to know if they regressed in that regard.

I'm finding it hard to believe that a normal HDD can ever beat an SSD for speed, let alone not talking about power consumption.

[noremac]

How slow are the SSD's really? Where can I find solid information regarding that? I'm asking because I have a 701 and Arch boots in 15 seconds from it, disk operations are truly fast, so I'd like to know if they regressed in that regard.

I'm finding it hard to believe that a normal HDD can ever beat an SSD for speed, let alone not talking about power consumption.


I just ran three test from the command line via hdparm to test the SSD speed:

I got between 19mb/s and 22mb/s on all three test.

[snowpine]

How slow are the SSD's really? Where can I find solid information regarding that? I'm asking because I have a 701 and Arch boots in 15 seconds from it, disk operations are truly fast, so I'd like to know if they regressed in that regard.

I'm finding it hard to believe that a normal HDD can ever beat an SSD for speed, let alone not talking about power consumption.

This was the video that "sealed the deal" and convinced me not to buy the 900a:

http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2008/09/mydigitalssd-on-asus-eee-pc.html

Watch from 2:40 to 9:30 to get a sense for the SSD speed on the 900a. Also compare the benchmarks on that jkkmobile page with the benchmarks in posts 43 and 47 of this page:

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=48673&p=2

(edit) For those who don't feel like clicking the link, the HDD in the 900ha reads and writes at about 60mb/s. Also note that I'm comparing it with the 900a, which is the slowest of the slow; my understanding is that the SSD speed varies widely from eee model to eee model.

[Onyros]

Wow... thanks for the replies, guys. I don't have the 701 at hand to test it right now, but I can't fathom it being that slow.

I'll put it through a couple of tests later on and report it here.

I mean, even slower they have some advantages in specific conditions (no moving parts and lower power consumption), but it makes me consider whether to buy SSD or HDD when I do go for a 9-incher - the 701 is my wife's.

[snowpine]

I believe the 701 SSD is quite a bit faster than the 900a. :)

I think the 4gb drives (including the primary drive in the 20gb model) are fast and the 16gb drives are slow.

But I'm not an expert; this is my first eee. I use it for audio production sometimes, so I wanted the fastest possible option. I also like that it's a standard size laptop hard drive, so if it fails, or if a SSD with the price and speed I want comes on the market, it's easy to swap. For that matter, if my eee gets crushed but the HDD survives, I can put the HDD in another laptop to recover my data.

[UbuWu]

If you want good battery time, I would instead go for the Samsung NC 10. It is a little bigger, but has up to 7 hours of battery life.

[gn2]

How slow are the SSD's really?

They're not slower reading, only writing.

[snowpine]

They're not slower reading, only writing.

Comparing what to what? A good SSD drive such as the MyDigital SLC reads at about 40mb/s whereas the HDD in my 900ha reads at 60mb/s.

[gn2]

SSD performance reading is not noticably slow, but writing is.

If you run benchmark tests you'll see a difference but in normal use you'll probably never notice.

[Onyros]

I just ran the tests in two laptops, one of them an EEEPC 701. Given the context, the results are somewhat surprising.

Mind that these are just reading tests, (hdparm -tT - is there a write test which we can use in Linux?)

Asus EEEPC 701 (stock 4GB SSD) --> 32MB/sec
IBM Thinkpad X31 (4200 rpm IDE 40GB HDD) --> 25MB/sec
IBM Thinkpad X31 (7200 rpm IDE 120GB HDD - tried it on for the test) --> 52MB/sec

The surprising bit is that the 4200 rpm drive is just 7MB/sec slower, I had expected the SSD to perform much better, not... just better. So, I suppose the 701's SSD isn't faster than the 900 as we previously thought. It's pretty much the same speed. Incredible that even so, Arch still manages to boot in under 15 seconds there.