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Kingston Delivers the First Good Sub-$100 SSD (after Rebate)

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Shiggity

Member
Joined
Dec 16, 2007
Location
Chicago, IL
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=4
The Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive is a 34nm X25-M G2 with only 40GB of MLC NAND Flash on it.

You read that right, Kingston gets to make a 40GB X25-M G2 under its own brand.

Kingston wants this to be specifically used for your OS and applications, where the speedy launch performance of an SSD is most useful. You’d keep your games, data and other large files on a separate hard drive. Why 40GB? To keep costs down of course. The Kingston drive goes on sale starting November 9th. The MSRP of the drive will be $115 ($130 with a 2.5” to 3.5” drive adapter), Kingston is offering a rebate through Newegg that will apparently drop the price to $84.99.


Kingston’s goal was to hit the sub-$100 price point and they did it, sort of. I’m not a big fan of mail-in rebates, and it remains to be seen if Newegg can keep the drive in stock at those prices, but the intention is good.

While the drive uses an Intel 34nm X25-M controller and 34nm flash, it doesn’t have the latest firmware from Intel, which means it doesn’t support TRIM. Since it’s technically not an Intel drive you can’t update it using the firmware I linked to earlier. The drive will most likely eventually get TRIM support, just not now. Unfortunately it doesn't even work with Intel's SSD Toolbox, again, because it's technically a Kingston drive.

With only half the NAND flash of an 80GB X25-M (only five NAND devices on board), its sequential write speeds are cut in half - Kingston rates the drive at 40MB/s. Random performance suffers a bit, but sequential write performance sees the biggest hit.
If you've already got a large hard drive for games/data and don't have that many apps installed, the Kingston 40GB SSD is a perfect way to move to an SSD affordably.
randomwrite.png


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sequentialwrite.png


sequentialread.png
 
to me from what i see on those charts this drive is actually way off the max compared to a lot of those drives...no doubt its agreat medium range ssd but its no where near some of those..
 
to me from what i see on those charts this drive is actually way off the max compared to a lot of those drives...no doubt its agreat medium range ssd but its no where near some of those..
In the article it says that the Kingston drive only uses five out of ten channels on the Intel controller. That probably explains the low performance. It is probably still a better experience than a JMicron drive.
Maybe Kingston payed them to rig the graphs
Why would Kingston pay them to rig graphs so that their drive doesn't perform well?
 
to me from what i see on those charts this drive is actually way off the max compared to a lot of those drives...no doubt its agreat medium range ssd but its no where near some of those..

The random read/write speeds are what is most important here. I'm thinking 2-3 of these in a RAID array would look incredible for under $300 AMIR. If there was confirmation of a tool that would perform TRIM/GC with the drives in RAID it would be a no brainer.
 
Anand said that TRIM will probably be supported in future firmwares. How long it will take? no one has any idea...

The worst thing about this drive in that the write speeds are incredibly low..
 
Anand said that TRIM will probably be supported in future firmwares. How long it will take? no one has any idea...

The worst thing about this drive in that the write speeds are incredibly low..

The only thing Im thinking about this is how often to you write a large file? Not very... Installing the OS, installing games/apps, downloading video from a recorder, etc. I would think that for the price I could handle a slightly slower performing drive for those few, "rare" instances.
 
The only thing Im thinking about this is how often to you write a large file? Not very... Installing the OS, installing games/apps, downloading video from a recorder, etc. I would think that for the price I could handle a slightly slower performing drive for those few, "rare" instances.

yea I agree with that.

If I was to get one of these, I would install my games on my HDD's cause games don't need fast opening and stuff. Apps (like office) do so they can open faster.
 
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