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Upgrade To Insanity

Q&A: Tom's Hardware And Kingston On SSD Technology
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TH: It almost sounds like we’re having an overclocking discussion.

LK: Yes! It’s a performance upgrade. I mean, you’re increasing the overall responsiveness of your system. It's akin to getting a processor upgrade. If you benchmark a system with PCMark Vantage and do nothing but change the HDD to an SSD, I gained over 40% overall system performance when I did this on my ThinkPad. It’s just like I overclocked the thing into orbit.

          

TH: I’ll second that. My main system used to take five minutes to boot. Now, with an SSD, it’s under a minute.

LK: If we can measure it in the amount of work you can get done, I think that’s a big deal. You’re not waiting for apps to open. I hang in HPC circles sometimes, and what’s the point of going with 24GB of memory and all this other good stuff when you’re still waiting on that hard drive? In the past, my solution has been to stripe four hard drives, but after one look at SSD technology, I saw that one SSD would smoke my four hard drive stripe. I just thought, man, this is the Holy Grail. And when I wanted even more performance, I found that SSDs in a RAID scaled just fine. So I don't know if there’s one killer app that I would pick for SSDs. Encryption is definitely one that we can point at easily, but I just think it's the overall system response. Like look at netbooks. That underpowered system is great for doing simple things, but to me it's almost unusable. Throw an SSD in one, though, and it gets usable really quickly.

TH: The president of OCZ told me that. He said I’d be stunned at the number of drives they sell that go into netbooks as upgrades.

LK: Yup, I wouldn't doubt it. People are doing whatever they can to upgrade to SSD. Throwing Vista or Windows 7 on a netbook is tough already on the processor. You've only got 2GB of memory. You’re making that thing work pretty hard, and SSD can really boost that, plus extend the battery life.

           

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  • 0 Hide
    nonxcarbonx , February 8, 2010 5:23 AM
    Kingston's mitigation software is the best I've seen. On another note, is there a link to the destruction video?
  • 0 Hide
    pink315 , February 8, 2010 5:23 AM
    "Now, with a hard drive, the arm has to move. Now, with a hard drive, the arm has to move."

    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.
  • 4 Hide
    ta152h , February 8, 2010 5:56 AM
    One way to preserve some of the life of any hard drive is to shut off virtual memory. Most computers don't need it, and if you do, than you're probably better off getting more memory anyway.

    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.
  • 0 Hide
    outlw6669 , February 8, 2010 8:19 AM
    Fun read but nothing really new...

    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 :p 
  • 7 Hide
    neiroatopelcc , February 8, 2010 8:27 AM
    Maybe it's just me, but I don't feel they properly answered the question of why there's a wear difference bewtween sequential and random ...
  • -6 Hide
    mitch074 , February 8, 2010 12:42 PM
    I solved my netbook's boot times...

    It runs Linux, with a compressed kernel image.

    Looks like real mode disk access, registry hives, antivirus and such do slow Windows boot times.
  • 2 Hide
    vvhocare5 , February 8, 2010 1:27 PM
    I guess Im not a fan of these types of interviews. The interviewee is really just trying to get advertising for their product and they only say good things and gloss over the negatives. They also have some good one liners they toss out, but thats about it.

    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.
  • -1 Hide
    JohnnyLucky , February 8, 2010 1:30 PM
    It's interesting but what about the price? Still too high.
  • 0 Hide
    anamaniac , February 8, 2010 1:48 PM
    Interesting interview.
    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...
  • 0 Hide
    El_Capitan , February 8, 2010 3:20 PM
    I like how they say, "The worst kind of writes that you can apply to an SSD are random. You will wear a drive out quicker that way". However, Kingston and Intel put all their advertising efforts into promoting the speed of their IOPS for their SSD's for server environments. That means they want you to buy their product to use it so it wears out quicker... which means you need to buy another one to replace it. Now that's a wicket smart business strategy.
  • -5 Hide
    El_Capitan , February 8, 2010 3:20 PM
    I like how they say, "The worst kind of writes that you can apply to an SSD are random. You will wear a drive out quicker that way". However, Kingston and Intel put all their advertising efforts into promoting the speed of their IOPS for their SSD's for server environments. That means they want you to buy their product to use it so it wears out quicker... which means you need to buy another one to replace it. Now that's a wicket smart business strategy.
  • 3 Hide
    GullLars , February 8, 2010 3:31 PM
    A couple of comments on the interview:
    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.
  • 0 Hide
    williamvw , February 8, 2010 3:36 PM
    nonxcarbonxKingston's mitigation software is the best I've seen. On another note, is there a link to the destruction video?

    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
  • -2 Hide
    ArgleBargle , February 8, 2010 4:54 PM
    Until flash memory as a whole becomes more reliable, I refuse to use an SSD. Having had a number of USB flash drives from various companies including Kingston fail (one from Sandisk became outright unuseable) even though I am careful with them and always use the "safely remove hardware" command. Flash memory has a very long way to go before I will trust anything important to it.
  • 0 Hide
    Anonymous , February 8, 2010 5:26 PM
    You should of asked them why the aren't supporting TRIM on last years V+ models with a firmware update. It uses a Samsung controller that was supposed to eventually support TRIM. I bought it with that in mind, and now they have said in email conversations with their support team that they will not be supporting it. Basically anyone who bought an SSD without TRIM is doomed to have worse performance a traditional platter drive eventually. I feel like I was robbed 180 bucks.
  • -3 Hide
    nevertell , February 8, 2010 5:28 PM
    mitch074I solved my netbook's boot times...It runs Linux, with a compressed kernel image.Looks like real mode disk access, registry hives, antivirus and such do slow Windows boot times.


    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.
  • -5 Hide
    El_Capitan , February 8, 2010 5:29 PM
    Woohoo, Kingston is awesome! I get a Thumbs up for this comment and Thumbs down for my other comments that aren't Kingston positive! Woot!
  • -7 Hide
    Anonymous , February 8, 2010 5:38 PM
    rectum and ball juice with a baseball bat!!


  • 2 Hide
    milktea , February 8, 2010 7:44 PM
    I like the idea that even if SSD goes bad, I can still recover my data possibly avoid paying thousands of dollars for the recovery. That is one thing that pulls me away from hard-disk into SSD.
  • -1 Hide
    darkguset , February 8, 2010 9:52 PM
    neiroatopelccMaybe it's just me, but I don't feel they properly answered the question of why there's a wear difference bewtween sequential and random ...


    True... it looks like they avoided answering the question and they just talked about the difference in speed (again!).
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