Zardon

We all love SSD's, some of us rich enough even own one and use it as a boot drive. Until recently however SSD's have been out reach of the average consumer - very shortly however that might change with the release of the new Kingston drive.

While the old SSDNow V Series range features a JMicron controller this new one is based on Intel's second generation controller and 34nm NAND flash technology. We reviewed this drive a while ago and it was capable of stunning performance.

The new drive Kingston are selling suffers considerably when compared to the larger Intel drive by offering around 170mb/s read and 40 mb/s write. However as boot times are mainly based around the read performance this will be considerably faster than any mechanical drive available on the market, unless you decided to Raid two Velicoraptors.

The amazing thing however is the price. Kingston are offering the drive on its own On November 9th for £71.27 which puts it firmly into the 'absolutely affordable' bracket, even for those on a tighter budget.

Sequential Speed*: up to 170MB/sec. read, 40MB/sec. write
Performance: enhances productivity; makes users more efficient
Innovative: 2.5" form factor; uses NAND Flash memory components
Silent: runs silent and cool with no moving parts
Reliable: less likely to fail than a standard hard drive
Shock Resistant: no moving parts; handles rougher conditions than a hard drive
Supports S.M.A.R.T.: Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology
Guaranteed: three-year Kingston warranty, 24/7 tech support
Capacity**: 40GB
Storage temperatures: -40° C to 85° C
Operating temperatures: 0° C to 70° C
Vibration operating: 2.17G (7-800Hz)
Vibration non-operating: 20G (20-2000Hz)
Power specs: Active: 0.15W (TYP); Sleep: 0.06W
Life expectancy: 1 million hours MTBF

Allan Campbell: Heaven Media

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comp_ali

Kingston demonstrates again its friendly attitude towards consumer's wallet .

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ET3D

This price definitely puts it on my "worth a serious" look list. That's the list of things I might eventually buy.

wand3r3r

Hmm, looks interesting and almost affordable. 40 GB is pretty low though.

simonw

40GB may sound low, but for me it will be enough for a boot drive and to store some apps so this Kingston SSD will interest me especially that it is affordable and based on Intel's 2nd gen controller.

You can always pair up the SSD with a high capacity HDD to store your other stuff, which I think most people will do. I don't think the majority will use an SSD to store everything because they are not large enough at the moment.

simonw

Reviews are now starting to appear, it seems the sequential write performance is not so great, bettered by a normal HDD. That will definitely be a factor when purchasing this SSD.

niceguyrichy

yeah, but surely you'd only be buying this for OS and most commonly used progs. in which case , sequential write performance aside, it still seems like a good price

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Zardon

Yeah to be fair, I think that was always going to be an issue with the reported speeds. That said, as a boot drive, the write performance is not that important in 'getting into the os'. Otherwise, certainly not an ideal drive, but paired up with a big mechanical storage drive it certainly is still a viable purchase. I think a few tweaks might need to be made to the OS however, such as turning off indexing etc.