Kingston explains why SSDs are good for notebooks

Kingston has been on something of a crusade to educate folk that solid-state drives (SSDs) should be viewed as operating-system boot drives rather than pure storage.

Hammering home the point, the company has released on a number of low-capacity drives with modest price tags - for SSDs at least.

Available for around £100 for a 30GB model, what's the point in opting for an SSD when a 2TB mechanical monster can almost be had for the same money? That's the question we posed Kingston during CES 2010.

The company then showed us a demonstration on two Lenovo laptops, differentiated by the left-hand one featuring a value-oriented Kingston SSD and the right-hand model housing a 5,400rpm spindle-based drive.

We'll let Kingston's Louis take it away.

Yes, the benchmark conditions favour SSDs massively, as it's uncommon to need 50 applications open at once, but the demonstration does give you an inkling into the kind of performance benefit that is made possible by ditching spindles for NAND.

SSDs still have some way to go before they can be considered mainstream, though. NAND prices have increased during 2009, bucking the usual downward trend. We had expected a 30GB SSD to cost £69 by now, instead of the £100+ they currently are.

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Also in the video he's talking about “unlocking the cpu potential of your high end notebook” not a netbook.

While they are great for speed a 30gb high performance SSD is going to add to far too much to the cost of a netbook, which is why most ssd based netbooks use far cheaper lower performance ssd's or a very small capasity higher performance ssd an 2nd larger capasity but lower performance sdd.

Um…. is it me, or were the speeds of actually getting INTO windows about the same, and just the “get through all the initial processing rubbish” slower on the spindle drive?

I'm surprised. I was working under the impression that an SSD would leave a mechanical drive standing on a normal boot (i.e. naked, not this artificial 50 document opening thing).

Man, I feel betrayed.

There's a difference between education, and propaganda. That, ladies and gentlemen, was propaganda.

There was clearly no difference in boot and login performance worth talking about. And SSDs have sod all capacity so regular and large file copy processes are so far removed from real-world use to be a joke.

If it were me, I would have refused to do that demonstration, I don't know how anyone could be that morally bankrupt. Kingston should have extolled the actual virtues of their ‘value’-range SSDs instead of this 54FF artificial barffest.

Epic fail, tbh. Far too long to log in. Waiting… waiting… still going. :rolleyes:

I disagree with the boot time comments. If you give Win 7 enough memory the OS boots fairly quickly with SSD or HDD. I've been testing the Intel 80GB drives with laptops in our config lab and seen basically the same thing. We're using 3GB with 7 and the system with the Intel SSD barely beats the HDD system to the desktop. I've seen a number of these SSD boot demos on video and I'm guessing they're running with 1GB of RAM or less to force the OS to page out to the SSD were of course it will be faster than a HDD booting up. I give Kingston props for showing a realistic demo. Regarding the 50 file open thing I say its a good representation of all the things that have to open in systray when you hit the desktop. AV, AntiSpam, power monitor, encryption…etc all these things prevent the user from clicking on his first program while the system loads them all. SSDs blow through those with no problem.

If you want to speed up boot times on a PC then eliminate BIOS like Macs do.

Kingston explains why SSDs are good for notebooks

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