On an Intel.com blog post the first pictures of Intel’s upcoming solid-state drives make an appearance.  There isn’t much to see, as you would expect with most storage devices, but its a good first step, right?  The engadget post purports that we have been “we’ve been waiting so long for Intel to stop talking and start producing” but I can’t recall getting that excited about SSDs until just recently.  Oh well, it doesn’t matter – we just want them.

Intel Solid State Drives (SSD)

Flash back to a couple weeks ago. In order to collect some real-world usage information and gain additional experience with the technology in an IT setting, I played the part of Guinea Pig and had one of our pre-production solid state drives (SSD) installed in my IT laptop (my IT guys will flip when they read this).

Although I was quite familiar with its capabilities from all the performance characterization data, I was unprepared for the powerful instant high it gave my system. It was such a dramatic difference in how my system responded that I found myself uninhibited in doing things that I previously would have shied away from.

I no longer aborted our backup client software whenever it launched itself (which is still at the most inopportune time possible, like when you’re in the middle of a presentation, since the ability of the IT software to detect the most inconvenient times to do things still appears to work perfectly), nor did I need to go for coffee while it ran. I actually continued working while it was running. I even ran it intentionally a couple times for fun to prove to myself that I wasn’t just imagining the fact that it had no noticeable impact on my system responsiveness. I no longer launched IE to do some surfing while Outlook loaded up in the morning (which of course only makes Outlook load even more slowly). This threatened to mess up my entire routine, not to mention my relationships with colleagues who I had been going to coffee with each morning while our systems struggle to make themselves useful.