Give your old Eee PC some super speed SSD

The netbook product category may have only taken off in the last 18 months, but Asus is the grandfather of it, starting the segment in late 2007 with its line of Eee netbooks. The early machines had tiny SSDs in place of the hard drives offering 160GB or more storage in current Eee models like the Eee 1008HA.

The early SSD-based netbooks used physically small-sized SSDs that are not easy to upgrade like traditional 2.5-inch HDDs and SSDs in many netbooks today. For users with Eee 900, 901, 901A, 901 Go, and S101 netbooks Super Talent has announced a new line of upgrade SSDs that are available in MLC and SLC variants. The MLC SSDs offer read speeds of up to 150MB/s and write speeds of 100MB/s and are available in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities. The 16GB version sells for $US85.99 ($AU107), the 32GB for $US125.99 ($AU156.52), and the 64GB for $US219.99 ($AU273.30).

Super Talent's SLC SSDs are even faster with read speeds of up to 170 MB/s and write speeds of up to 130MB/s. The SLC versions of the SSDs are available in 16GB and 32GB capacities at undisclosed prices. You can count on the faster SLC drives being significantly more expensive than the MLC drives.

So far the drives haven't turned up at Australian retailers, but Super Talent gear is widely sold here, so keep an eye on StaticICE. (Note that the MLC 64GB drives showing up in that search are not the same -- they are slower than the SLC drives Super Talent has announced.)