TH: We obviously do a lot of benchmarking on Tom’s. What’s the official rule on how people should condition their SSDs for proper testing?
LK: For us at Kingston, it's no secret. We just take Iometer and run it through a 4K, 100%, random write test. Iometer will basically fill up the drive so every piece of NAND, essentially every cell, now has data, and then it's benchmarked at that point. That process levels off the drive very quickly. If you take a brand new SSD from Kingston, create a partition, format it, and run any kind of benchmark. You'll get a monster number. But as soon as you go back and level that off with something like Iometer, you'll see that number settle into a consistent result. And the number that we publish publically is that leveled-off number.
TC: I think we do a 5- or 10-minute Iometer test. You'll see the drive level off when you're doing that. Another way is to run a secure erase before the benchmark. From then on, the drive will be conditioned.
TH: Do competing brands use the same process when they state their numbers?
LK: Funny that you mention that. We do a lot of competitive analysis, but I don't think we do too much comparison to their marketing sheets. But based on the reviews I've seen, it seems like the numbers match up. You’d be pretty dumb not to because those numbers will drop pretty quickly.
TH: I have a cousin who borrowed my X25-M for his gaming rig at PDXLAN, thinking it was going to change his entire universe. After the event, he admitted that he really couldn't tell much of a difference, and I was like, “Dude, your game is going to be limited by your graphics card or CPU, not your drive. What did you expect?” So let’s clear this up. What are the top applications that people actually do need SSDs for?
LK: On the client side, for me, it’s all about boot times and being able to open up applications. Here in the office, we use Lotus Notes for email, which can be slow starting up. When I click on that icon to launch Lotus Notes from a hard drive, I'm waiting seconds and seconds and seconds for that password prompt to come up. With an SSD, it’s like I blink and it’s there. Or one common response from first-time users is, “Holy cow! My system’s booted already!” And we have all these little agents—anti-virus, firewalls, a bunch of stuff that the hard drive has to chew through even once it hits the desktop. For me, that's where SSD has really shined. Yes, with gaming, your levels will load quicker. If I'm playing Halo or whatever, the map will load faster from the drive, but the game play itself? I don't think that's going to make a big difference. Gaming like at PDXLAN, that's mostly about processor and GPU and RAM. From the corporate IT side, we've also heard a lot of good things on the encryption stuff. When we have corporate customers running encryption software, running it on SSDs seems to help with the transition from HDDs. In terms of the original image being created, we've heard numbers as bad as four hours to build an image and encrypt it. After switching to our SSDs, that dropped to one hour. That's huge.

I'm not sure if you were trying to be dramatic, or if you just accidentally wrote the same thought twice. Just pointing it out.
The ideal thing for booting up fast would be to go back to using core memory :-P. RAM that doesn't lose power when you turn it off is pretty cool. Low power, low heat, and would impress people when you say "Oh, that? It's my core memory array.". You'd get dates for sure. Can't say what they'd look like, or if they'd be sane. Or even female
Still, I'd buy it. Cache handles most reads anyway, and I'm too old fashioned to feel something is a computer without some form of magnetic storage in it.
I like how good they are at dodging the tough questions.
What value is there in Kingstons Intel based SSD's vs Intel original?
Well, they helped Kingston launch a very strong product
It runs Linux, with a compressed kernel image.
Looks like real mode disk access, registry hives, antivirus and such do slow Windows boot times.
I would prefer to see the product benchmarked and compared on price..and then let us decide how we are going to spend our money.
Keep them coming. =)
Now I have the urge to go buy a 256GB SLC drive and play flaming baseball with it... I probably shouldn't...
1. Apploading is NOT sequential, it has a high ammount of random reads. This is why SSDs are so much faster than harddrives at it. You can see this in PCmark vantage, where harddrives get 4-10MB/s in apploading, and SSDs go from 80-160MB/s.
2. Booting from an SSD over USB 3.0 is wastefull. Most SSDs support NCQ, and get 3-8x higher random read IOPS when NCQ is active, and this is noticable in everyday use. USB 3.0 does NOT support NCQ.
3. You say Windows 7 requires minimum 16GB to install, wich is true. The PARTITION must be minimum 16GB for the installer to allow it to be selected, however you can reduce the size needed for windows a lot. My windows folder is 13,5GB, and even with 20+ apps installed (MS and Open office suites included) i still use less than 20GB on my C: partition.
The need for a pagefile is reverse proportional to your ammount of RAM, if you have 4GB or more RAM you can safely deactivate it for normal general computer usage and save a lot of space.
I think you mean "migration" software. Although mitigation software could be really useful for resolving hardware errors. ;-)
The Kingston videos are fun. Start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJ8TzvJne8
This dude IS wright. And that old nt filesystem isn't helping either.
If you optimize X startup, use a different kernel start-up event manager, you can get below 10 seconds startup time with a netbook.
True... it looks like they avoided answering the question and they just talked about the difference in speed (again!).