Agency: The Viral Factory
Client: Samsung SSD
To demonstrate just how amazing and revolutionary Samsung’s SSD hard-drives are, The Viral Factory has used them to build the world’s most powerful consumer computer in a film called “SSD Awesomeness.”
Samsung’s brief was to create a film which would demonstrate to the uber-geeks of the technology world just how astoundingly good SSDs are. The Viral Factory instantly knew they had just the man for the job, their very own in-house expert and internet oracle Paul Curry.
Paul built a computer using 24 SSD drives to build the mother of all computers in just 24 hours, and then The Viral Factory created a short film to highlight the astonishing things it could do. The film can be seen here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fmt=22
The capabilities of the drives were tested in a series of experiments, designed to highlight just how big the difference is between an SSD drive and a computer running from a standard hard drive. Spectacularly, the experiments included the super-computer:
· Opening every program in Microsoft Office 2003 in 0.5 seconds
· Opening every program (53) in the start menu of Windows Vista in 18 seconds
· Durability testing – Paul bounced up and down on a trampoline while holding all the drives in his hand– standard hard drives would have failed or paused to avoid damage, while SSDs worked just fine as they have no moving parts
· De-fragmenting one of the arrays in a matter of seconds
· Deleting time – Paul ‘recycled’ every speech that George Bush ever wrote (6gb) instantly
· Copying a 700MB DVD from one RAID to another in 0.8 seconds, in a shorter time than it took for a DVD dropped out of The Viral Factory’s office window to reach the ground
· Immediate and fast playback of 4MB images in sequence.
Matt Smith, director at The Viral Factory said: “We’re really pleased with the results of this film. Letting Paul loose on the project to do something he thought was really cool has turned out much better than us coming up with the usual marketing nonsense. The seeding has also worked brilliantly because Paul was able to answer questions and reply to comments in the tech communities - the response to a real live person actually bothering to engage with the audience has been fantastic.”