The Effects of Audio on Performance

One of the more interesting aspects of running with the Kingston SSDNow M Series drive I have is the perception of speed.  Actually when using the drive, it isn’t perception but reality.  It’s fast.  But it’s also silent and that adds, or more accurately, takes away a whole dimension.

I really noticed this the other day.  I was trying to decide what operating systems I wanted to continue to maintain for my Dell D820.  I’ve maintained a Windows XP Media Center 2005 image for it for a long time now.  Time to kill that.  So I decided to whack it and install our new internal build of Windows 7.

Now keep in mind I’ve already been using Windows 7 on that machine with the SSDNow drive.  But this time around I’m installing on a traditional disk.  When I started the install, I immediately noticed how much nosier the machine was.  Then I started watching the disk light and listened to those awful disk access sounds.  It immediately made me think everything was slower.  Of course it was, but the added noise just intensified the perception. 

Then I got to thinking.  What perception do I have of my MacBook Pro and the fact it’s nearly silent as well?  That always annoyed me about the Mac.  How dare they make such a quiet machine and show all of the other OEMs it can be done.  Now to be fair, the MacBook Pro I have can get a little noisy when it heats up and kicks the fan into high gear.  You really know when that happens.  Sounds like a jet turbine spinning up.

The reduction in noise by a SSD drive is impressive.  I can just imagine walking into a data center in the not too distant future filled with racks of SSD drives or memory and the room is near silent as compared to current data center standards. Lights out and silent.  “Sounds” impressive.

So the upside to having the SSDNow drive is the silence and not having to listen to the search indexer or whatever is happening on the disk as the day goes by.  The down side is not have ten 500GB SSD drives for all of my machines.  Heck, I’d settle for a 160GB drive at the moment but like I always say, dreams are free.  Interesting stuff noise is.