HP plunks 16GB SSD drive into slim business PCs
Small drive for fat wallets
Hewlett-Packard is henceforth packing flash solid-state drives into upcoming models of its ultra-slim business desktops.
HP's Compaq dc7800 series desktop now has an option of adding a 16GB SSD from SanDisk. Not a lot of capacity, and the disk will add an extra $330 to the system.
The disk isn't for everyone, obviously. Places office receptions where computers need fast and repetitive access to simple applications may find it more on the money. HP is also driving home the bullet points of lower energy consumption, start-up time and lack of moving parts that make SSDs appealing, if you can afford them.
HP claims the dc7800 stands as the industry's first business desktop to include an SSD option. That could be true as far as we know. Although technically nothing - outside of sanity - is stopping a person from using a hideous Alienware desktop gaming rig with an SSD to do Excel spreadsheets.
The dc7800 desktops running Windows OS use a range of Intel's Core 2 Duo processors. Boxes with higher-end chips support Intel's vPro technology for management. The other OS choice is FreeDos, which can come with a Intel Core 2 Duo, Celeron, or Pentium chip.
According to HP's pricing page, a basic configuration starts around $1,200 with the SSD drive. The same system with an traditional 80GB disk starts at $730. ®
COMMENTS
Pricing kind of sucks.
As an eee owner, I have been loosely following the pricing of SSDs to replace the 4GB unit in mine. Newegg now has 16GB drives for $179. These were considerabily more expensive just a month ago. Still not cheap enough, but a better price than the $300 upgrade from HP on a desktop that doesn't need it...
SSD - Still a Bad Idea
SSD of recent mfg have sectors that are said to have lifetimes of 2 to 5 million writes. A logging process often will write to the same sectors, for tree balancing, pointer updates - whatever - for every actual data record written. So, after some time the SSD sector virtualization is going to declare the sector bad and transparently substitute another. Still you've just killed a sector. How often you say? That's a good question.
MS Volume Licensing
"So the question remains - why can't the major OEMs ship with no OS nowadays (and hence no OS or software support of course)? That's what I want (and I'm sure most companies would too) since I want to put my own OS (Linux) on it (and many companies have a volume licence for Windows, negating the need for a pre-install OS)."
The terms of the various permutations of Volume Licensing may have changed in the past 4 years (when I tried to buy some Dells without Windows), but I doubt it: the desktop OS licenses included in VL agreements don't actually cover you to put a clean OS onto a bare metal machine. You need to have an OEM licence (the little sticker with the long code on the side) *first*, and then the VL will allow you to put either an upgraded version (ie. XP onto a PC which had 2000 Pro or Win9x on it), or in certain cases downgrade rights (that is you pay for XP but can install 2000 instead).
Why can't both run in harmony!
OK Power saving and carbon footprint b0llox aside. why can't a SSD run the OS and Office apps and then use a normal HDD for data storage.
I have developed the habit of creating a 20GB partition for XP and Office then using the rest of the drive for whatever I want. (makes regular formatting of the machine easier).
This begs the question...
How will a 16GB SSD with XP Pro on it fair againsts a 38GB 10k rpm Raptor with XP on it?
We need a deathmatch!
