What is the fastest drive with a ZIF interface?

Question

I'm shopping around for a new drive to replace the SSD in my Aspire One netbook. Looking at reviews and quick write ups it would appear that the fastest drives are only reading at ~ 80 to 85MB/s and writing at half that.

Is there a faster alternative that will fit in my Aspire One (zg5, AOA110-1955 with the Intel 8gig SSD) without too much modification (i.e. soldering)?

Answer 1

The problem with cheap (MLC) netbook SSDs is indeed the write speed. FlashFire is a software solution that should solve the issue, basically it's using system memory as write cache:

• FlashFire is software for Solid-State Drives
• FlashFire uses host RAM to enhance random write performance of a SSD
• FlashFire is especially useful for the system using low-end SSDs

I know it helps a great deal with certain Eee PC models that shipped with poor performing MLC SSDs (e.g. the Eee PC 900/16), even speeds up the SLC SSD performance in my Eee PC 701. Try it first before spending money on upgrading a rather cheap netbook.

Here is a ATTO Disk Benchmark comparison, without FlashFire:

with FlashFire:

Of course, there are many more tweaks to improve the performance of such SSDs, over at eeeuser.com is a quite informative thread dealing with the matter.