Kingston SSDNow M Series Bundle

[Rob Williams]

Have the urge to jump on the SSD bandwagon, but don't want to go through the hassle of yet another format and OS re-installation? Don't fret, because Kingston has got you covered. With their new SSDNow M Series bundle, you'll have all you need to upgrade from your current drive, while keeping your OS configuration and applications intact.

You can read the full article here and discuss it here!

 

[Merlin]

Another good article, Rob,
You have me wondering if I could put this drive into my Asus EeePC 1000H Netbook.
I know the processor isn't up to par as well as the disk space ( 160 gig to 80 gig ) and I would also do a clean install instead of cloning.
But lower power consumption and maybe a little faster performance would be a nice update to the netbook.
I'll see if there is any information on this

 

[Rob Williams]

This drive in an Eee PC is extreme overkill. I recommend finding the least-expensive (but reliable) SSD, depending on how much storage space you need. The Eee PC is in no way capable of tapping the potential of an SSD, and to be honest, I'd estimate that throughput would be something like 15-20% of what you'd see on a desktop. It would make much more sense to just purchase a large mechanical drive, unless it's durability you're worried about.

As for power consumption, realize that SSDs require more CPU power than a mechanical drive (it's like 20% CPU usage compared to 5%). So while the drive requires less power, the CPU is being pushed harder, so it negates potential savings on a slow notebook. Larger differences are seen on faster notebooks, and even there the differences are almost not even worth talking about.

 

[Ben]

As for power consumption, realize that SSDs require more CPU power than a mechanical drive (it's like 20% CPU usage compared to 5%). So while the drive requires less power, the CPU is being pushed harder, so it negates potential savings on a slow notebook. Larger differences are seen on faster notebooks, and even there the differences are almost not even worth talking about.

Please elaborate. How does a SSD require *more* CPU usage? To the OS, the drive shouldn't matter, it sends the data to it, the drive takes care of it. It requests data from the drive, the drive retrieves it. It doesn't appear like CPU usage would be a concern at *all*.

 

[Rob Williams]

Take a look at our results here from a recent notebook article:

http://techgage.com/article/gateway_md7826u_156_notebook/3

On two different notebooks, using the SSD (in brackets) resulted in at least a 2x CPU usage %. Why is this the case? I'm unsure, but you can trust me on the fact that an SSD in an Eee PC will hardly be utilized. I used an Intel X25-M in the equivelant of an Eee PC this past Jan, and running a benchmark through Linux proved 15% as fast as a mechanical drive.

Next time I get a hold of another netbook and another notebook for that matter, I'll test this further.

 

[Ben]

I did some searching on this issue this morning, and I found this article at Tom's and this is what they had to say:

In short: really fast SSDs that can deliver 200 MB/s or even more of throughput become limited by CPU performance due to power saving mechanisms—or more precisely, they are bottlenecked by a limited availability of CPU time.

 

[Rob Williams]

Yes, and on fast CPUs, the problem becomes less-evident. On notebook CPUs, it does. It becomes less of a problem with Quad-Cores though, because there's more processing power to begin with, but on a Dual-Core notebook, 20% CPU usage is rather high. Either way, the extra speed is worth it.