When you’re going to buy a netbook you have to make a choice between a flash-based solid-state drive (SSD) or a conventional hard disk drive (HDD). When you need lots of storage, a conventional HDD is recommended. Because SSD drives are still more expensive than HDD’s, they come in smaller capacities. But solid-state drives have some important advantages:

- Lower weight and size.
- They start up faster, as no spin-up is required.
- They have fast random access for reading, as there is no read/write head to move.
- They are usually completely silent.
- Often (but not always) low power consumption.
- Low heat production.
- High mechanical reliability, as the lack of moving parts almost eliminates the risk of mechanical failure.
- Larger range of operating temperatures.

There are some disadvantages too:

- SSD prices are still considerably more costly per gigabyte than are comparable conventional hard drives.
- Capacity is currently far lower than that of conventional hard drives.
- Higher vulnerability to certain types of effects like magnetic fields and electric/static charges.
- Limited write cycles – flash-memory cells will often wear out after 10,000-100,000 write cycles.
- Slower write speeds – as erase blocks on flash-based SSD's generally are quite large, they are far slower than conventional disks for random writes and therefore vulnerable to write fragmentation and in some cases for sequential writes.

They Asus EEE PC 701 had 4 GB of SSD. The 900 has 20 GB and the 901 has 12. The Lenovo IdeaPad S9 and the Acers Aspire One both A110 have 8 GB. The long expected Dell E might get 4, 8 or 12 GB SSD.

When you prefer a SSD, it’s always possible to increase your netbooks storage capacity with external flash cards, USB sticks (often very cheap) or traditional external hard disk drives.

i am using a dell mini 9 with a 16 gb ssd, and the start up time doesnt seem to be any faster than with a standard disk, i wonder if i have on of the cheap types !!