SUNBURY-ON-THAMES, England, September 9, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Kingston Digital Europe Ltd, an affiliate of Kingston Technology Company Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, has commissioned an independent test that shows how upgrading a PC from HDD to SSD can improve the performance of older PCs by 50% and brand new PCs by 27%[1]. To enable enterprises to quantify this, Kingston Technology has released an easy to use interactive Kingston SSDNow Return on Investment (ROI) Calculator (http://www.kingston.com/ukroot/ssd/about.asp) to help IT decision makers understand how SSDs can deliver immediate ROI to the client computing platform. .

Today's CIOs are still battling with tight budget investment plans.

While enterprises will transition at different rates and times, every CIO faces the need to raise productivity, create new capabilities and use the recovery to drive fundamentals of the current agenda and the repositioning of IT, Mr. McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP said. Such transitions will not happen overnight but they will start with the decisions and directions established in 2010.[2] However PC refreshes are not on the agenda. Gartner estimates that a significant percentage of the 94 million desktop PCs shipped to the professional market four years ago and the 61 million notebooks shipped three years ago are due for upgrade or refresh this year.[3]

With the cost of SSDs having reached a sweet spot[4], enterprises can now achieve real cost savings by upgrading a system with an SSD for approximately a third of the costs (including man hours) compared to buying a new laptop or workstation. The Kingston SSDNow ROI Calculator allows IT decision makers to identify the impact that SSDs can have on client desktops and notebooks to improve business performance, demonstrate cost savings and reduce business risk.

Darwin Chen, VP of Sales Marketing, Kingston Digital: Many companies are going to be forced to refresh or upgrade client desktops and notebooks in the next year. Not only have SSD prices been falling by 50 per cent per GB per year[5], but companies also get the benefit of increased performance[6] and reduce business risk[7]. Upgrading existing assets to SSD can save companies huge amounts of money and also maximize the performance of PC investment. Our SSDNow ROI Calculator is designed to provide IT decision makers with the metrics needed to decide whether to delay a refresh or invest in new PCs and the business impact SSD can have in both scenarios.

The Kingston SSDNow ROI Calculator allows the input of specific company information - including PC inventory, staff costs and average drive failure downtime to produce an estimate of gains across the PC's lifecycle and the time taken to achieve ROI. The Kingston SSDNow ROI Calculator is available in Dutch, English, French, Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. Partners and customers can find everything they need to know about SSD technology on the Kingston SSDNow Series Learn More Center.

Notes to editors

Details of the test

Kingston Technology commissioned independent performance tests in association with Dennis Technology Labs in the UK. The tests were run on two laptops of the same vendor, of different ages to see if the benefits are in any way limited by the specification of a computer. Both laptops were tested with PCMark05, which runs under both Windows XP and Windows 7.

PCMark05 is an industry-standard benchmarking suite ( http://www.futuremark.com/products/pcmark05/), which is designed to test every aspect of a computer's performance.

Both laptops were tested with their HDDs, then upgraded to a Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB and tested again. The results were compared to find out how much of a performance boost an SSD can give over the HDD.

Laptop 1:(2008 - 2 years old)

Dell Latitude D620 CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo T7200@2GHz System Memory - 1GB, DDR2 OS - Windows XP Professional 32bit SATA Interface - SATA 1.5Gbps Base HDD - 80GB

Laptop 2: (2010 - new this year)

Dell Latitude E4300 CPU -Intel Core 2 Duo P9400@2.4GHz System Memory - 4GB, DDR2 OS - Windows 7 Professional SATA Interface - SATA 3Gbps Base HDD - 160GB

The System Score is a geometric mean worked out from the scores of all the subtests in PCMark05.

In the case of an old laptop running Windows XP with an 80GB HDD, installing a Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB has a massive impact on performance. The Dennis test showed the laptop improved its overall System Score by 50 per cent.

In the case of a relatively-new Windows 7 laptop, the overall increase in speed of 27 per cent caused by upgrading to an SSD might not seem as impressive as the 50 per cent increase from the same upgrade to our Windows XP laptop. However, the E4300's hard disk is both newer and faster than the 80GB model in D620, while the system is faster overall.

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About Kingston Digital, Inc. Kingston Digital, Inc. (KDI) is the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the world's largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Established in 2008, KDI is headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, USA. For more information, please call +44(0)1932-738888 or visit http://www.kingston.com/europe

Kingston and the Kingston logo are registered trademarks of Kingston Technology Corporation. All rights reserved. All other marks may be the property of their respective titleholders.

About Dennis Technology Labs

Dennis Technology Labs is an independent testing facility that evaluates personal and business technology, including hardware and software. We specialise in security testing, using a world-class anti-malware testing framework.

We work with businesses, technology vendors and magazines to provide accurate and realistic test results that are useful to consumers and vendors' internal teams.

With years of experience and strong, trusted relationships with businesses and the public, Dennis Technology Labs is an ideal testing partner.

http://www.dennistechnologylabs.com

[1] Dennis Technology Labs: Dell Latitude D620 bought in 2008; Dell Latitude E4300 bought in 2010

[2] Source: Gartner Press Release, Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of Nearly 1,600 CIOs Shows IT Budgets in 2010 to be at 2005 Levels January 19, 2010

[3] Source: Gartner Personal Computer Quarterly Statistics Worldwide By Region: Final Database - 26 August 2010

[4] Source: iSuppli, Kingston, May 2010

[5] Source: iSuppli, Kingston, May 2010

[6] Source: Kingston internal tests - Kingston SSDNow boot times up to 60% faster than HDD

[7] Intel 2010: SSDs have reduced failure rates of 0.5 per cent compared to 4.9 per cent for HDDs

SOURCE: Kingston Digital Inc

CONTACT: Media Relations: Emilie Beneitez Lefebvre, Kingston TechnologyEurope Ltd, +44(0)1932-738813, ebeneitez@kingston-technology.com; MaggieZaboura, Zaboura Consultancy Ltd, +44(0)7990-527278, maggie@zaboura.com