How to Netbook Hard Drive Repair for Solid state Drives?

If you have either the Older
Asus Netbook

Or the HP Mini

with a dead or malfunctioning Hard Drive as many do, there is a cheap solution available for you.
These older models were sold with an electronic solid state hard drive installed that fails after it has been written to for a prolonged period of time. The replacement SSD (Solid State Drives) are usually very expensive and will definitely fail again. Most are manufactured in either 4 or 8 gigabyte sizes. Some larger drives were available optionally but the standard netbook usually has the smaller units.
Because of this, many PC repair shops have turned away customers they simply couldn't help, or referred them to the original vendor. Some consumers have even tried switching to USB thumb drives with very little success since not all thumb drives will boot, and even less can endure the multiple writes necessary for a proper paging file (Virtual Memory).

Since that time, Addonics Peripherals has developed a replacement carriage that utilizes a standard SD card such as the type used in digital photography and digital cameras. The size of the required SD card isn't limited at this time, so most High speed SD cards will do the job quite nicely. Standard SD cards DO work, but are a little slower.These drop-in replacement drive carriages fit in any Netbook with a standard Zif ribbon cable which most all of the older Netbooks have.

As you can see from the photo they compare in size quite nicely with the original SSD in your Netbook. This photo was taken from Ebay where the Chinese version of this device is substantially cheaper than the original model. This particular model has both the IDE and Zif connectors to ensure maximum compatibility with all major brand SSD based Netbooks.
The real beauty of this replacement though, is that should your drive ever fail you can simply replace the old SD card with a new one for a very small amount of cash. Also remember that while your Netbook is open you can make an instant backup of your Operating system with a second SD card which you can store in a safe place until it is needed. Optionally you can do the same thing if your Netbook is equipped with a memory card reader by cloning the drive. This doesn't always work, but it's worth a try.
Other types of cartridges use CF (Compact Flash Medium).

These are typically faster than all other replacement drive types, and some are actually mini hard drives in a CF case. The tradeoff, however is the price. CF drives are more expensive than SD memory, and are easier to damage. CF memory cards, however are more durable than many other types of Storage and are used in Ipods and Digital Video Cameras.
Other Carriage types and cartridges exist for Desktop PC's as well, like the one below.

Hopefully this has given you new hope for that old Netbook you thought was useless because nobody wanted to repair it. If you feel that this type of repair is beyond your ability, simply take the parts to your local PC shop and have them install the device for you. You will be doing them a favor by introducing a new idea to them and they may even be grateful enough to do it for free. You never know!