This post isn’t about the Acer Aspire One, but in general it might be useful for those looking either to buy the 8GB SSD or 120GB model.

According to TomsHardware Guide, they extensively tested various SSD hard drives, compared to standard hard drives, and report SSD use more battery power!
However as expected they are faster for read and write speeds.

“The results of our testing are a shock for anyone who cares about battery run time, as our results prove unmistakably that battery run-times do not increase when using flash based SSDs. As a matter of fact, most flash SSD products actually contribute to emptying your battery even faster! Mainstream flash SSDs — if they can even be called “mainstream” at prices of $500 and up — do not even provide convincing performance while they help to suck your battery empty quicker than before.”

15 pages of tests/benchmarks here

However the website Laptop Mag has their own views and tests, regarding the testing dowe at Toms Hardware Guide:

“What we need is a battery-loading benchmark which is representative of REAL-WORLD USE. For example: boot up the machine with maximum charge at a controlled temperature and sit it on 5-6 auto-refreshing controlled content web pages. Reduce all the other power outlays to the minimum - Vista power saver mode, turn down the brightness, but maybe keep the wireless network connection just to keep it close to a real use-case.

Toms didn’t do that - they ran a benchmark designed to “keep the notebook busy” and surprise, surprise the SSD’s died faster under load - disproportionately to the power they consumed (perhaps NOT disproportionately to the work achieved in that time… but Tom’s doesn’t tell us how much “work” was achieved relative to the drive’s performance… they don’t even mention the power-saving settings.”

Read more at laptopmag.com