Make your Asus Eee 900/1000 run 4x faster

Previously, I described how to set up an Asus Eee 1000 to run Eeebuntu and described the 8GB / 32GB Solid State Disk setup it has. What I didn't realise then is that the 32GB SSD provided was much slower than the 8GB SSD, and that the 8GB SSD wasn't particularly fast either.

You can now purchase a much faster "Runcore" drop-in replacement for the 32GB SSD.

It is 4-6x faster for read/write and makes apps that were sluggish before, such as Firefox, respond quickly. Boot and shutdown time and noticeably faster too.

The Runcore is sized at either 64GB or 128GB. I went for the 64GB option (enough for me!)

The full title for Googling is RunCore 64GB PATA Mini PCI-e PCIe SSD for ASUS EEE PC 901 and 1000. Phew.

In the US you can buy it from mydigitaldiscount.com ($220) and in the UK I bought mine from memoryc.com for £160 inc. VAT. Check out the comments on there from other happy customers :-)

Installation is simple. Backup all your data to a USB stick (usual warnings about proceeding at your own risk). Shutdown and unplug your Eee PC. Turn it over. On the back there is a panel (red rectangle below) retained by two precision screws (red circles). One of these on mine was hidden under a silver "EeePC" sticker which I had to peel up for access.

Unscrew these using the (provided) precision screwdriver and lift off the panel. You can then remove two screws to release the existing 32GB memory card. It is simple to push in the replacement one and screw it down. Replace the panel and screw that down. Here's my old Asus 32GB card in the box the RunCore card came in from memoryc.com:

Now power back up and on the BIOS boot screen press F2. Go to Advanced, IDE Configuration and you should see [RunCore 64G-C SSD] as the new drive.

What I did was install Eeebuntu 3.0.1 (Ubuntu 9.04) to the 64GB RunCore SSD (format it and use 100% of space for root / partition) and use the Asus 8GB SSD as the Linux swap space (select manual configuration at install time to be able to do this). After that I restored my user files from the backup.

Works like a charm!