The Acer Aspire One A110L and A150L look a lot alike on the outside. But inside, the A150L packs a 120GB hard drive while the A110L has an 8GB solid state disk. As we learned yesterday, solid state disks may be more durable than hard drives and consume less power, but they’re not always faster. And a member of the Eee PC News.de forums has confirmed these facts by comparing the two Aspire One models.

The results? My German’s not too good and Google Translate isn’t much better, but if I have this right, here are a few highlights:

  • Using Linpus Linux Lite, the A110L boots up in just 6 or 7 seconds, almost twice as fast as the A150L
  • The SSD is much slower in Windows XP. It took 53 minutes to install Windows XP SP2 on the A110L compared with 34 minutes for the A150L. And the A150L boots Windows in about 18 seconds, while the A110L takes abotu 30 seocnds (which isn’t really that bad).
  • The A110L case is 3mm smaller and the laptop weighs 978 grams while the A150L weighs 1121 grams.

The different in battery life was nominal. Using both models, the tester was able to get between 2:30 and 2:50 of run time. With the A150L selling for just a few bucks more than the A110L the choice between one version and the other seems like a no brainer if you plan to install Windows XP or another operating system. But if you plan to stick with Linpus Linux Lite and don’t need the additional 72GB of storage capacity, it sounds like the A110L might be the better choice.

Update: As Zeroed points out in the comments, some of these tests were performed with an upgraded A150L with a 32GB solid state disk. So the results probably won’t apply to an off-the-shelf unit.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,545 other subscribers

2 replies on “Acer Aspire One A150L is heavier, faster than A110L”

  1. I’ve measured boot times on in store models of both the linux/flash model and the XP/hd model. The former took about 15-20 seconds, the latter well over a minute. I don’t know how much of that is due to linpus booting faster than XP, but I suspect a lot is.

    Also, I’ve seen the claim elsewhere online that what makes the flash disk so slow with XP is the way it is formatted, and that the problem can be largely eliminated by reformatting it appropriately.

  2. No, you got it all right and well, at least with the tests.. 😉

    I’m afraid you missed something else though:
    The tests were performed with the A150L sporting a Transcend 32GB SSD instead of the 120GB HDD. With the original HDD the A150 ships with, I somewhat doubt the A150 to be that much faster than the A110, especially if you look at the transfer rates (pics 1 and 3)
    The Transcend SSD used in the Test ships for under 80Euros (that’s around 110 USD), while it’s smaller brother with 16GB is available for under 35 Euros (about 50 USD), but the prices will probably be even lower in the States because of the tax situation and stuff.

    Greetz
    Zeroed

Comments are closed.