About 6 months ago I got a laptop with a (non-Intel) solid state drive (SSD). While I loved the reliability and power savings, I was under-whelmed with the performance, especially when writing to the drive. Last month I upgraded to a new Intel SSD and the difference was amazing. With the introduction of Intel’s revolutionary SSD products, this technology is ready to take the IT world by storm and win over both the end-users and the IT department.

For end-users, the performance benefits are astonishing – it’s like putting a turbo charger on your PC. I’ve seen benchmarks that show Intel’s SSDs being up to 700% faster than 7200 RPM hard drives on certain tests. But for me, the only test that matters is the real world. For my test, I used a coworker’s standard IT supported laptop. It’s a 2 year old model with a corporate OS image and we defragmented the hard drive before beginning the test. We copied the hard drive image onto the SSD and made no other changes. We then booted the same laptop multiple times using both the SSD and HDD. The average boot time on the HDD was 3.5 minutes. With the SSD it was 45 seconds! Almost a 5X improvement in boot time!

Installing applications, opening applications, startup and shutdown were all amazingly faster. Even though the test is over, the coworker won’t give the SSD back. Users are going to love SSDs.

But SSDs aren’t just for users. IT is going to fall in love with SSDs as well.

Hard drives are usually the top failure mechanism in a laptop…and data recovery services for failed hard drives are expensive. Without any moving parts, SSDs bring unparalleled levels of reliability - Intel's SSD is rated to withstand a 1500G shock. So even if the users are leaving their laptops running while they are running to catch a plane, the SSD won't be damaged. When traditional HDDs fails, it’s usually without warning and catastrophic. By the time you know there is a problem it’s too late to do anything. SSDs generally “wear out” instead of “failing”. This “wear out” process is predictable and detectible…meaning you can plan to replace aging SSDs before they lose data. And the anticipated end-of-life of an SSD is a lot further out in time than most of us keep notebooks. The combination of increased reliability and the predictability of the failure is going to be a huge benefit to IT.

Not only are SSDs rugged, they are energy efficient. Intel’s SSDs use about 1/10^th the energy that a HDD uses. For laptop users, this delivers even longer battery life. But the power savings are so compelling that IT departments are beginning to use SSDs in their servers to bring down energy bills. In fact, Intel has a separate line of SSDs focused on the server market.

Most OEMs have begun offering Intel SSDs on their latest notebooks. During today’s economic times, stretching IT budgets is more important than ever. Other posts have discussed how Intel® vPro™ Technology can deliver significant Total Cost of Ownership savings by reducing desk side visits. Combining those savings with the savings from Intel SSD products can really help keep a lid on ongoing PC support costs. And the end-users have a great performing PC too. It’s pretty rare these days when both IT and the end-users can both be happy. We’re all witnessing one of those rare, Win-Win situations.