Upgrading Old PCs with SSDs: Where’s the Notion of Balance?

Martin Veitch of the UK’s www.CIO.co.uk online magazine recently wrote a blog that echoes one SSD vendor’s push to get SSDs considered as serious upgrades for aging PCs. This SSD vendor is trying to draft behind the top PC upgrade, more RAM, which is commonly known to boost PC performance--up to a point. Veitch quotes the vendor’s vice president for SSD and Flash: "The hard drive is the bottleneck." Yes, well maybe it’s “a” bottleneck. Maybe not "the" bottleneck. Maybe not "the only" bottleneck. It really depends on the PC’s age and how ambitious the upgrade is, doesn’t it? Veitch writes about his conversation with this VP:

“Trends such as server-based computing, Windows 7 migrations, security quarantines for desk-less workers and so on require a faster drive, he suggests. Many businesses that passed on Windows Vista need a refresh but can't afford a full desktop refresh so SSDs do something significant to speed and represent a simple upgrade for about $250 versus $1000 for a new PC.”

The question is, does this idea pass the sniff test? Again, I think, it depends on the age of the PC. Some PCs still in use are old enough to be using IDE hard-disk interfaces rather than SATA interfaces. There aren’t many IDE SSDs on the market. One 256-Gbyte IDE SSD just introduced by Buffalo is supposed to list for $1220. Better to buy a new “$1000” PC at that price, right? And just when did the price of a new PC become $1000. More like $500 for either a good desktop or a laptop unless you’re specifically buying loaded business laptops.

However, 256-Gbyte SSDs are pretty expensive. Perhaps business users can get by with 80 or 100 Gbytes suggests Veitch’s blog while quoting Stuart Gale, head of global IT service at Intelligent Energy. Gale says:

“One of our concerns in providing half a terabyte or a terabyte is [users saying] 'look at all the space I have here! I can put on all our family pictures and MP3s.' [Smaller capacities are] more than ample and it keeps users a bit more current.”

This statement strikes me as being almost as disingenuous as some claims in the early days of microcomputers where the best home application that microcomputer manufacturers could offer was recipe storage. Considering that the target market for these machines was overwhelmingly male at the time, that particular marketing effort didn’t pay off well. Microcomputers took off with spreadsheets, word processors, databases, and (sigh) PowerPoint. Business PowerPoint presentations, which we crank out by the dozens, now weigh in at tens of Mbytes each because we put a lot of images into them. Not “family pictures” mind you. Many of us are now producing business-oriented video for YouTube and other outlets to use on our business Web sites as well. Video is the fastest way yet invented to chew up storage space on a PC. Family pictures! Please. That’s pretty condescending.

Although limiting SSD capacity to 128 Gbytes might keep the upgrade cost down, migrating a laptop or desk PC from Microsoft's Windows XP to Windows 7 doesn’t just stress the storage media. My company-issued, single-core Lenovo X-series laptop isn’t a good candidate for Windows 7’s “Aero desktop experience.” To avoid choking on all that Microsoft code, my laptop really needs a faster dual-core processor, enough RAM to run the newer OS well; and a “modern” SATA disk interface that’s not limited to 1.5 Gbps, which will bottleneck the SSD. Plugging an SSD into my laptop isn’t likely to really boost performance much. Bringing it up to spec with a new processor, more RAM, and a faster disk interface is simply not possible. It's a laptop. A forklift upgrade is the only solution here.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried. I have a loaner upgrade kit from an SSD vendor and have experimented with migrating the contents of the HDD to the SSD. Despite my decades of experience in designing and building computers and PCs, my efforts failed. The tried and true method, fully supported by this SSD upgrade kit, is to place the target SSD in an external USB enclosure, use the supplied software to clone the HDD inside of the laptop onto the SSD, and then physically swap out the HDD for the SSD. Everything went smoothly, but the laptop wouldn’t boot with the SSD in place. I tried exactly the same procedure using a second HDD instead of the SSD and with the same software and enclosure supplied by the SSD vendor. It all worked great. It’s the SSD’s problem. The laptop booted with the new HDD. What’s wrong? Who knows? Can’t find a clue on the Internet although I did find several users of this particular laptop with this particular problem. My guess: something funky in the laptop's 1.5-Gbps SATA interface.

I must conclude that PCs of a certain vintage are simply not slam-dunk obvious candidates for SSD upgrades. There are many costs involved. There are hardware upgrade costs and software upgrade costs for new operating systems and new applications. (Priced a business copy of Microsoft Office 2010 lately?). Then there are the costs associated with the time needed for an IT person to attempt perform the upgrade and the time lost by the PC users who are sitting and looking out the window waiting for their PCs to be returned.

Now this isn’t a diatribe against SSDs. Not in something named the “Denali Memory Blog.” The message here isn’t “SSDs are no damn good!” Not at all. They’re very good when balanced with an appropriately fast processor, enough RAM, and a suitably fast disk interface--that’s a holistic approach. An approach with balance. Like everything we make, SSDs are not a cure all for everything.