Kingston Proposes SSD Kicker For Old PCs

With business unable to meet the huge demand for desktop upgrades, memory maker Kingston has proposed a radical solution: plug in solid state drives and keep the old kit going.

Analysts have predictd a boom in PC sales in 2010, as around 70 million desktop PCs and 20 million laptops come up for replacement. However, IT budgets are flat and users are looking for alternatives. Rather than replace those desktops, Kingston suggests that users can give them a new lease of life by replacing their hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD).

Darwin’s theory of desktop evolution

“IT budget is focused on the server side, so we’ve got a trend that says we have more PCs coming up due for a refresh and a shrinking budget for client systems,” said Darwin Chen (left), vice president of Flash and SSD at Kingston Technology, speaking to eWEEK Europe on a visit to Europe.

Users can try doing nothing till things get to breaking point, or raid the budget and buy brand new systems to upgrade their fleet, he said. Alternatively, they can look at other ways to keep them going.

Replacing the hard drive with an SSD can make a system boot up and and shut down quicker (one of the major complaints users have about old systems) and also allow new functions such as encryption to be installed.

“One client of ours in San Diego has 20,000 users on company notebooks with an average age of 30 to 40 months,” said Chen. “They are introducing hard disk encryption, an SSD SATA drive upgrade.”

With US SSD prices around $2 (£1.30) per Gbyte, companies can upgrade for around $200 (£130) per computer, compared with a $1000 replacement cost. For this money, users see boot times fall to around a minute or less – Chen says some of his clients were suffering more than 20 minute boots.

It also gives IT departments the chance to impress, said Chen. When users despair of their PC’s performance they turn it into the IT department, who spend four hours cleaning it up and tweaking the registry for miminmal benefits. Instead of this, IT staff can swap in an SSD and get a 40 percent boost right away, while adding new features such as encryption at the same time.

“The IT manager can say to the CIO, ‘it’s either $800-$1000 to replace each machine, or we can upgrade with SSD'”, he said. “Instead of taking four hours to clean up the registry and giving the machine back with a ten percent improvement, by plugging in an SSD, within an hour they have accomplished the corporate agenda, and improved the user experience by 40 percent. They’ve gained three hours and delivered a better result.”