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.


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!).