netbook hard drive question

[mert9869]

Hello all,
Any help you may offer will be much appreciated. I am a 29 yr old female with VERY basic computer knowledge and I intend on purchasing a "netbook" mini laptop in the next half hour and I have narrowed it down to the Acer model with 120gb hard drive and the Dell 9 mini with only 16gb hard drive...I am leaning toward the Dell, but there IS a substantial difference in the hard drives. How important is that? Should I lean toward the Acer for that added difference? I will mainly be using the mini to browse the web, shop online and book hotels and get maps when traveling. I do not even know how to download songs or mess with myspace etc. I wont be dl'ing movies, playing games or loading photos most likely either. So, is 16gb really going to be sufficient for me? Thanks so much!!!!

[ShyguyXPC]

I would think so.

the 16GB drive is also a Solid State Drive (consists solely of chips, does not contain any moving parts like normal drives, the 120GB drive in the Acer is a Rotational/traditional style Hard drive)

so basically if you accidentally dropped the netbook (obviously from not too high up), the Dell would better survive than the one with sensitive moving parts.

supposedly also netbooks with SSD drives are supposed to use less power, longer battery life due to lack of a motor for the rotational drive & all that. as well as a bit faster data access too.

but for the uses you mention, the 16GB model sounds like it would do the job. if for whatever reason you did download images & sound & video to it, you should be able to connect it to a desktop system or wireless network & download the data to another PC (or even USB drive if it has a USB port on it), to free up drive space.

[jasonz0rz]

Other netbooks offer larger Solid State Drives - Asus' Eee PC has a 40 GB drive, but you'd be on Linux instead of Windows.

Dell and Acer aren't the best brands to go with imo. If you have time, I'd highly recommend shopping around, or at least looking over customer reviews of the two models you're considering.

[SandraWilson]

I went though the same process just last week. I think the reliability of the SSD drive is much better and it also increase the battery life. So I went with the SSD.

A friend of mine pointed me to a service that is in Beta called Zumodrive.com which make the amount of storage you have irrelevant

I am will try that at some point if I need more storage. They seem to let you stream your music to Itunes which would be what I would use it for.