I recently purchased a 64 GB Transcend 2.5" IDE solid state drive
(TS64GSSD25-M) to replace my Hitachi Travelstar 60 GB 7200 rpm drive in my
HP tablet TC1100.

The drive works flawlessly. However, it is only slightly faster than the
physical 7200 rpm drive. It's better, but I have to admit it is a big
disappointment. The rate limiting feature seems to be the speed of the
TC1100 processor (1.1 GHz).

The OS (XP and then service pak 3) installed without incident. Formatting
the disk only took 40 secs! I recall it took several minutes for the 60GB
physical 7200 drive. I've reinstalled all my applications - no errors. The
drive is seductively silent. I've performed numerous defrags (not that this
needs to be done on a solid state drive), all without problems. The drive
stays cooler than the 7200 rpm drive, and uses battery power a little less.

However, it is nowhere near as fast as I thought it would be. Everything is
a little snappier than my 7200 rpm physical drive: installations are
quicker, some programs load a little faster. But it doesn't blow your mind
away. Hibernation takes as much time as with my 7200 rpm drive, a big
disappointment. It takes my TC1100 about 30 secs to close down in
hibernation (from the tap on the Q menu), and about 25 - 30 seconds to wake
up from hibernation (from pressing the on switch to the beginning screen,
10 - 15 seconds just to go through the "resuming windows" progress bar). It
uses battery power less, but not dramatically so. It's also not all that
light - may scale says 90 grams for the solid state drive, 115 grams for the
Hitachi 60GB 7200 rpm drive. I guess I was expecting something very light
weight. The solid state drive is supposed to have much greater shock
resistance, but I've never dropped a laptop or experienced a broken 2.5"
drive.

Overall, a good product. But having used the product, I'm not sure it is
worth the cost when compared to physical drives. You can get this drive
from Amazon or NewEgg for $250 - $300. It's better than the physical drive,
but I was expecting really short times to place the PC in hibernation mode.
That is not the case. Defrags also still take a lot of time. So, some
things work very fast, others show no difference. Movies are not jerky, but
they weren't with my 7200 drive.

I once had a 5400 rpm drive on my TC1100. I found a noticeable difference
in speed between it and the 7200. Upgrading memory from 512k to 1GB RAM
also made a noticeable difference. In comparison, the noticeable difference
in speed using the solid state drive is not that great when compared to a
7200 rpm physical drive.

It seems, for the TC1100, the rate limiting feature is the speed of the CPU.