I have WD running on an Asus eee 701SD. WD runs fine, but I recently had to replace the SSD. I guess the reason the SSD failed is too many read/writes with the netbook running 24/7. I replaced the stock 8GB SSD with a 16GB Super Talent drive as that was the cheapest I could find. I
A couple of options (well three, actually) spring to mind: A RAMDisk, which is something i’m looking to implement in my quest for a totally silent PC, a USB stick - they’re cheap enough to be disposable; certainly cheaper then SSDs; or an external drive. I have a 2.5" laptop drive in a caddy the size of a packet of cigarettes that takes the power it needs via USB (though it’s not used for weather stuff). By the way, I’ve recently migrated my setup from an ancient Thinkpad to a ‘nettop’,; basically a netbook without the screen. It easily handles WD, a web server and some continually running custom weather software I wrote. And that’s in addition to duties as a media/print server and NAS!
Steve
Thanks Steve
With your ideas in mind, can I install (or move) WD to a SD or SDHC card? It’s not obvious in the FAQ’s. It looks like WD is happyest in the root directory of C:.
BTW I found this interesting article about installing XP for minimum read/writes:
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/windowsxp
Jim
I made exactly the same mistake. I thought a Dell Inspiron 910 with a SSD would be the ideal low cost, low power, reliable data logger. But after 6 months the SSD was dead. STEC claim that the SSD is good for 10 years “under normal operating conditions” but do not publish the more important number of read/write cycles.
As far as I am aware USB memory sticks use the same technology and would have the same constraint with read/write cycles. But they do have the advantage of being much cheaper and easier to replace.
If you want real time weather data, reading/writing data continuously is unavoidable.