The Acer Aspire One may be one of the cheapest ultraportable laptops around, with prices starting at just $379. But it’s also one of the slower laptops on the market. The folks at the Acer Aspire One User forums have discovered the hard way that the SSD or solid state disk used by the Aspire One A110 has a slow read speed. That means that while the laptop offers decent performance with Linpus Linux Lite, Windows XP is pretty sluggish.

So what do you do if you’ve already dropped $400 on a laptop and don’t feel like trading up for another model? Disconnect the SSD, buy a speedy CompactFlash card and get a CF to ZIF adapter to throw into your laptop. At least that’s what forum member andy53 did.

He picked up a Transcend 300x CF card, which has aread speed of 44MB/s and a write speed of 22MB/s. That’s a bit faster than the read/write speeds you’d get from an Eee PC 900 and nearly twice the read speed and 4 times the write speed of the internal SSD that ships with the Acer Aspire One.

[via jkkmobile]

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7 replies on “How to replace the SSD in the Acer Aspire One”

  1. Try download flashfire for ssd and install it…… then feel the difference. good luck……

  2. hey, where is the benchmark? I changed the cluster size from 4k to 32k on my FAT32 and the speed is pretty good

      1. 1. What SSD do you have, slow Intel or fast (relatively) Samsung ?
        2. Have you noticed significant drawbacks of such large clusters (waste space) ?

  3. The write speed is the problem with the laptop. As a matter of face, the read speed is pretty decent, I think the Aspire One has one of the fastest boot up time in the os that i have ever experience. After i install window xp, it is still very fast to boot up, but once you trying to do something…….. The HD version is a lot better in terms of speed (but is heavier and have a spining hard drive…..mm…….I think i’ll get a cf to swap the ssd instead….

  4. It’s not the read-speed, it’s the write-speed. XP writes to the disk almost constantly. Supposedly, if you turn off most of the unnecessary writing, XP works OK. There’s also a thread about using the “enhanced write filtering” DLL’s from Embedded XP to cache all writes to the flash until/unless you tell it to commit. That apparently makes the thing fly – at the risk of losing things like installed software and registry changes. But for that, it helps to have more than 512M of RAM.

    1. I’ve installed XP on my granddaughter’s Aspire One and I’ve increased the ram to 1gb but it is very slow. If it is unnecessary writing that’s causing the problem how do I turn it off? I would be very grateful if anyone could help. Thanks     

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