Review The de facto standard for netbook storage might now have become the hard disk, but that still leaves rather a lot of machines out there with solid-state drives, some fast, some slow, all low capacity, at least when compared to HDDs.

Enter the purveyors of after-market add-ons, ready to supply extra netbook storage for owners who find that the 4GB or 8GB SSD in their Eee PC, Inspiron Mini or Aspire One isn't big enough.

An example is Crucial's N125 64GB solid-state drive, a compact card designed for netbooks with storage connected by Mini PCIe slot. One problem with SSD-based netbooks is a total lack of standardisation on how SSDs should be connected. The Acer Aspire One uses a parallel ATA bus and a ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket, for example. Others have the main SSD simply soldered onto the motherboard.

That limits the applicability of Crucial's upgrade, but if you have a machine that does take Mini PCI storage, such as the original Eee PC, the Eee 900 - which we used to test the 64GB SSD - and the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, you're half way there. The other key question is whether you can access the slot to fit the SSD.

With the Eee 900, at least, it's easy. The netbook has 12GB of solid-state storage: a relatively fast 4GB SSD soldered onto the motherboard and a slower, 8GB module. That latter is exposed by removing the hatch on the bottom of the Eee, and replaced by removing a couple of screws.

The Eee's 8GB is a full-length, 7cm Mini PCIe card. Crucial's N125 is a full-length card too, but the company also offers the N100, a half-length card suitable for other machines. Beyond their size, both upgrades are identical, according to Crucial. And both are available in 32GB and 64GB forms.

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Replacing the SSDs is a doddle, though the Crucial unit is unformatted so owners of Windows XP netbooks won't see the drive once they reboot their machine. It'll be listed in Device Manager, but not in My Computer.

To prepare the drive for use, you'll need to open the Control Panels window and double-click on Administrator Tools. Among these is a utility called Disk Management, and here you get a list of connected drives, including the new one, probably as 'Disk 1'. Right-click on its name and select 'Initialize Disk'. A Wizard will guide you through the partitioning and formatting process. When you're done, the N125 will appear in My Computer as D:

Iometer 2007.07.27 Results
Asus Eee PC 900 Stock SSD 8GB

That's the case with the Eee 900's secondary drive. If the upgrade replaces the main SSD, you'll need to boot up an installer or recovery disc with an external optical drive, initialise the new SSD then re-install your OS and apps.

We ran PCMark05's HDD benchmark on both the original SDD and the Crucial and saw no real difference between the two: they scored 987 and 980, respectively - less than a percentage point difference between the two.

Iometer 2007.07.27 Results
Crucial N125 64GB

That they scored effectively the same is not entirely surprising. Both drives use a controller made by Phison and multi-level cell (MLC) Flash technology, which is inherently slower than the single-level cell (SLC) design used for the Eee's main SSD. But it's also cheaper, which is why the 64GB upgrade costs just £123. The 32GB SSD will set you back £66.

We also ran Iometer 2006.07.27 on the two SSDs, running from 4KB data block up to 8MB. The original Asus SSD's average random read and random write speeds were 38.7MB/s and 4.9MB/s, respectively - its sequential read and write speeds averages 41.8MB/s and 24.9MB/s.

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For these four speeds, the N125 rated 39.6, 4.6, 41.7 and 15.7MB/s. The Asus drive did considerably better on sequential writes, less well on sequential and random reads. When it came to random write speeds, there wasn't much in it.

The upshot, then, is that Crucial's upgrade is all about capacity not performance: you won't get to your data more quickly with the N125 but you will be able to store more of it.

That's for the Eee PC 900. What about the Dell Mini 9? Dell declined our request for a review unit to try the upgrade out on, so we can only assume the PC giant isn't interested in helping its customers get more out of their machines.

But the Mini 9 we reviewed (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/11/05/review_netbook_dell_inspiron_mini_9/) in November 2008 - courtesy of Vodafone - scored 1136 in PCMark05's HDD test, so again, don't expect a performance gain if you replace it with Crucial's SSD. The Mini 9 comes with up to 16GB of solid-state storage, so there is a big capacity gain to be made by upgrading, especially if you opted for the cheapest, 4GB model.

The original Mini 9's SSD did score more highly than the Crucial, but in practice, we'd say, you won't notice any reduction in speed.

Verdict

If your netbook's running short on storage space and it has a Mini PCIe drive, Crucial's N125 and N100 are worth considering as an alternative to buying a new, HDD-equipped machine. The 32GB versions are cheaper than 32GB SDHC cards, and 64GB SDHCs a very thin on the ground. Then again, might a cheap 16GB SDHC meet your extra-storage needs?

The downside is the upgrade's speed, which isn't impressive, but at least not really any slower than factory installed SSDs. ®