Kingston Proposes SSD Kicker For Old PCs

Laptops with SSDs also gain in other aspects of performance such as battery life, said Chen, since the SSD uses less power than a hard drive, and is much more robust since it has no moving parts.

But won’t users rebel against this make-do approach, preferring the prospect of a nice new laptop, possibly running Windows 7?

“Most employees now understand that their companies are under some budget constraint. They know they can’t get a new machine, so they toss the problem at the IT department,” he said. SSDs let the IT managers actually deliver something for them: “Our customers can all have smiles on their faces – they have the greatest tool for internal PR.”

Although vendors like Dell hope that Windows 7 will boost their sales, most users are aware that Windows 7, like Windows Vista before it, is not a solution – in fact it is quite the opposite.  Corporate upgrades to Windows 7 are going so slowly, said Chen, that he expects Microsoft’s aggressive plans to phase out XP to be extended by user demand.

“Most organisations I meet haven’t upgraded to Windows 7,” added Ann Keith, Kingston’s regional director for public sector end users, sitting in on the interview. “Most prefer to sweat their assets“.

“Many companies are not switching for at least twelve months or more,” said Chen. “SSDs can buy them time for another two years, until they are ready to roll out Windows 7 across the whole organisation.” And some people will find the SSD gives their old laptops enough grunt to actually run Windows 7 anyway when the time comes.

The turning point for SSD?

Even aside from desktop refresh cycles, the time is ripe for SSDs, he said. “With falling NAND prices, this year is the turning point for SSD”. Although they are still substantially more costly than hard drives, the benefits of SSDs are starting to outweigh the extra costs of using them.

Even “brand spanking new PCs” can benefit from an SSD because the hard drive is the bottleneck.

And the thin clients that are sometimes used in the public sector also work better with an SSD, he said, as these need less local storage. “For many, 40Gbyte is enough, so £70 can be a great upgrade. Even better than upgrading RAM.”

For him, it’s just the next stage in a long march for NAND Flash memory. In 2000, the digital camera proper emerged, and has now replaced film. Then USB memory sticks effectively replaced the floppy disk drive, and NAND Flash memory usurped the position of the 1-inch hard drives used in MP3 players, such as the early iPods.

“NAND makes phones smarter and more functional, and is now doing the same for the tablet – in the Apple iPad,” he said. “In each one of those new categories, the change typically happened not because NAND was cheaper but because, with its ruggedness and low power consumption, users could easily ignore the small price premium.”

The next frontier for NAND is in office SSDs, he reckons: “The consumerisation of IT will push the commercial side along. NAND is now cheap enough, so SSD device can become a part of the PC platform – and decision makers are starting to realise this will help solve their most critical problem, their ageing population of PCs.”