'Should I buy a netbook with a SSD or with an HDD drive?'

Many of the netbooks that are being sold nowadays offer the possibility of choosing between a hard drive or a Solid State Drive (SSD). But which one should you choose when buying a netbook?

The first thing you need to remember is that SSDs cost much more than a hard drive. Ofcourse, the difference between them decreases, but SSDs are still quite expensive in comparison with hard drive. Besides the high costs, SSDs come only in quite small sizes (with a maximum of around 16GB whereas hard drives come in sizes of around 160 GB). When you just want to use your netbook for surfing the internet, a storage capacity of 8GB should be sufficient, but if you want to do more with it, 8GB won’t be enough.

The biggest pro of a SSD is that it needs less power than a hard drive. So if you want a long battery life you really should consider a SSD. Besides that, there are a lot of SSDs that offer much higher performance than a hard drive, thanks to the absence of moving parts. But this goes mostly for the expensive SSDs, which are not always installed in cheap netbooks. There are some cheap versions out there but their performance is quite low and/or have a high power consumption. The absence of moving parts also increases the durability of the drive and makes it completely silent.