Cebit 07: SSD boots twice as fast as hard drive

Sandisk claims its solid-state-disk (SSD) boots a notebook up more than twice as fast as a standard hard drive.

A demonstration on its stand at Cebit showed two Dell notebooks, identical other than that the hard drive in one had been replaced by an SSD, booting into a Powerpoint presentation.

The SSD version finished in 44 seconds and the other in 112 seconds, making it 154 per cent faster. The timings include the loading of Powerpoint.

Doreet Oren, Sandisk’s director of product marketing, admitted that the hard disk had not been defragmented. The SSD scores most over the hard drive when reading data that is dispersed, as it typically is on a much-used PC drive before defragging.

The difference is much reduced with contiguous data because the hard drive’s read head does not have to move around so much.

But Oren argued: “We are showing the performance as it would be for most users. Who do not defragment the hard drive.”

She said there was not technological reason why SSDs should not have a greater capacity. “We chose 32GB because we thought that is enough to hold what most people will need on a notebook, but is still a price they can afford.”

Sandisk now offers SSDs in both 1.8in and 2.5in form factors. A 2.5in model costs $350 when bought in bulk.

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