"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better...stronger...faster!" The opening to the Six Million Dollar man and my computers have a lot in common lately. Both were just average, but forced into a situation beyond their control. For Steve Austin, it was a crash that caused him to be rebuilt. For my computer, it was the same. So I contacted Kingston about getting one of their SSDs with the intention of putting it through its paces. Little did I know that would happen, and so much more.
The original intention of this writeup was to talk about the differences that a new Kingston 128GB 100V+ SSD would make in a PS3 and a netbook. I will let you know now, before we go any further, that I walked into this with a bunch of hearsay but no practical experience with an SSD. I was as new to the technology and product as many of you, but I had one distinct advantage. The Kingston SSD Facebook Group and Kingston Twitter have been invaluable sources for research, and the members of the Facebook group have been wonderful for bouncing ideas off of, even when they don't always go the way that I thought.
I have been a member of the Facebook group for a while, but even after deciding to do my review I wanted to walk in with an open mind. So with the thought that I wanted to make sure that everything was going to be even, I did my research on Kingston's closest competitors, as well as other viable options. If someone were using the SSD as an external hard drive, the options are wide open. Kingston and some of their competitors make large capacity thumb drives. Western Digital makes the Raptor series of hard drives, which spin at 10,000rpm. And of course, there are numerous SSD manufacturers out there. Many of them offer similar features, but features isn't even half of what will become important.
This review was supposed to be about just my PS3 and a netbook, but turned into so much more. I will start with the PS3, because that is where I first witnessed my SSD shine. After going through the removal and rebooting steps of the hard drive in both my PS3 Fat and Slim, I went ahead and ran a comparison between each of the consoles, as well as running the same games on each. I decided that the best way to go would be to use Gran Turismo 5, since it had some incredibly notorious load times. The install time wasn't something I had planned on being reduced, but for those of you who want to get into the meat of your game quicker, I saw an improvement of about 10 minutes or so on both systems. On the Original PS3 I saw load times reduced by almost half, from 38 seconds to right at 20. It wasn't quite as drastic on the SlimPS3, with it going from 32 to 20 seconds, but this is still a reduction of 1/3 to 45%, which is something that ANY gamer can be happy with. I also ended up with a much unforseen bonus. Both of my PS3s rany much much cooler than they had previously. I keep both in semi ventilated areas, so both have been know to get a little hot after a couple of hours of playing, but due to the nature of the SSD, this was reduced drastically. If you are a PS3 gamer who wants the best from his favorite current-gen system, this is an upgrade that I highly recommend.
Netbooks are a different beast entirely. The purpose of a netbook si to have an ultra-portable PC with all of the basic functions someone needs from a computer, and none of the bloat of a DVD or Blu-Ray Drive. They aren't as powerful as a desktop or even a midgrade laptop, but they really aren't supposed to be. The entire reason for having one is to have the majority of your computing at a reasonable reach. A 10" netbook can be so wonderful when you have a 2 year old and want a portable entertainment system. It can also be fantastic when your wife is a blogger who tavels to meetings and needs to jot down some notes or look up some things. One of the huge advantages that a netbook has over a laptop is fantastic battery life. Since they run on much more efficient chips and fewer processes, they batteries don't have to work nearly as hard. Using a Samsung netbook with an Atom processor you can squeeze 9.7 hours out of the battery according to Samsung. A real world number is a bit lower...clocking in right around 8 hours depending on how you configure your netbook.
Now take all of that and slap in a Kingston SSD. Put a clean copy of Windows 7 on your computer. Boot it up. Pick your jaw up off of the floor. The 20 second boot time you just saw happen? It's real! The extended battery life you will notice 9 or 10 hours down the road? That's real, too. This will vary from netbook to netbook, but if you don't get around a 10% gain in battery, quieter operation, and a little more pep out of your netbook, then you did something wrong!
And now we arrive to laptops. Oh my poor little Toshiba, why must you hate me so? A while back I picked up my Dell, but with my wife's Compaq going on the fritz we needed a solution to keep her up and running as long as possible. Out of the mothballs you come, little Toshiba. With your weaker battery life, Vista, and 4gb of RAM you have so little to offer! But just like Steve Austin, we can rebuild you. We can make you better, faster, stronger. We can get a ridiculous amount of bang for our buck, and slap in the same SSD which has now seen a netbook, two PS3s, and some various amounts of data saved from each. What can a "used" SSD do for a well worn laptop? Well if that SSD is a Kingston, I can tell you first hand that it can do wonders for your aging laptop. My battery life returned to a state of usefulness. With a fresh install of Vista (because I wanted to compare apples to apples) the boot time was reduced to almost a netbook-like state. Programs zip along. It's the equivalent of making a 3 year old laptop run as good as a new one fresh from the box. There isn't much more that can be done, and sooner than later the memory will be the last upgrade I can attempt to put my aging Toshiba onto an even playing field with my current Dell. We will see about that.
Recently, Kingston became aware of a possible data loss in their SSDs. Instead of sitting back and waiting for the bombs to drop, they got proactive and sent out a warning through available channels to let people know of the potential problem, and got onto a fix right away. I have dealt with many manufacturers of various products, but have found myself more and more pleased with Kingston after each interaction. The customer service is at a level that few companies care to strive for. If you have a problem or a question about their SSDs, the Kingston Facebook page has people who can take care of it without hesitation. When a company puts itself out there as a company for the people, then stands by that promise, that makes them right in my book. There may be companies out there who would argue that they do more for customers, and I challenge them simply: Show me.
Now I have a simple question for you. If you were given an SSD, how would you use it? If you have an SSD, what is your next path of upgrade? Have your experiences mirrored mine? Have they differed greatly? I want to know.
Full Disclosure: I received the Kingston SSDNow 100V+ 128GB from Kingston for review purposes. No compensation was given, nor expected, from this reviewer.
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