Kingston's $85 40GB SSDNow V Series SSD gets heavily benchmarked
By Darren Murph 
posted Oct 27th 2009 5:36PM
posted Oct 27th 2009 5:36PM
Aw, snap. For years now, we've been waiting (and waiting) for solid state disc prices to stoop down from the realm of you've-got-to-be-kidding-me, and now it finally looks like the everyman can ditch the HDD and get onboard with flash. Kingston's newly announced SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive ain't very capacious, but for just $84.99 (after rebates) at NewEgg, it's definitely affordable. The drive itself isn't slated to ship until November 9th, but the cool kids over at Legit Reviews seem to have already wrangled a unit for review. Kingston promises sequential read rates of up to 170MBps and write rates of up to 40MBps, and while that's certainly not mind-blowing, it's not too awful given the 2.5-inch form factor and bargain-basement price. Oh, and critics found that the drive far surpassed published speed ratings in testing, which is always completely and utterly awesome. Hit the via link for more, vaquero.[Via Legit Reviews]
Provide no glaring flaws show up I am definitely buying one for my OS and one for my games. :)
Sweet, we are getting somewhere
Yarrr
wtf.
japan has been getting SSD's for around the same price as this but only 32gb.
read 150mbps and write 90mbps since 2008.
around 120-130 for the 64gb same spec.
around 250 for the 128gb version.
i plan to use it as my OS drive and still use the old 3.5 7200rpm 2tb hdd as data drives.
mayb now i'll use it for bootcamping on my umbp15''. wonder if it'll fit that whole superdrive replacing bay thingy.
170mbps/40mbps read/write rates == FAIL. I'm sticking with my 128Gb OCZ Vertex thank you very much.
@A 5 Star Dining Experience:
And how much did that cost you?
I am looking for the biggest and best technology forum. Can someone point me in the right direction?
neowin.net has a great forum so does toms hardware ( google that name)
anantech.com has a great section on SSD's
eggxpert.com Neweggs own
Obviously overclock.net with over 100,000 members.... and millions of post's...
hardforum.com
If the drive was double that, and even if the price was double that I would bite. 40GB is too small though. Even for my netbook.
@ John Doe
I bought the 64 GB model at Fry's for $125 (after rebate). It included a USB enclosure for the 2.5 inch SATA drive I was replacing. Now I have a laptop with 64 GB SSD plus a portable drive for backup! Works great with Windows 7.
I am hating my boot times on my Asus G50, maybe getting this for the OS only would be a good idea. Generally do SSDs have a good longevity? I know they can only be written a X number of times.
Looks like Newegg pulled the deal.
Yeah it does :(
Really? This isn't cheaper, look at the friggin $/GB ratio, it's still hovering around 2.
They scaled it down, but it's not worth the money yet.
Not worth the money? It certainly is worth every penny. I was able to save over 1/2 hour in waiting time per day since I upgraded my workstation with a couple of OCZ Vertex SSD's. Booting up the system alone went from 3-4 minutes to now just 17sec.
@ Gungel, How many times do you reboot your computer each day?
The only time I wish my HDs were faster is when moving existing files on my HD around--importing files from my 30Mb/s SD card isn't a bottleneck, and exporting is a CPU bottleneck. Even with my RAID0 array of 7200rmp drives, boot time is quite fast, but I restart my computer maybe once every two weeks...
What do you do such that SSDs make you so much more efficient? I've been thinking of getting one for my boot drive, but would highly prefer cheaper 3.5in alternatives, like a 3.5in 60GB drive for $60.
I'm working with large ACAD Drawing files and 3D renderings. For example, loading a 500MB drawing with my old disk took up to 3min. Now I'm looking at a few seconds and renderings save even more time. It could take up to 10min for a complicated drawing to load that is now more like 30sec to 1min.
What really matters are random reads and writes, which are FAR faster than any disk-based HDD right now.
Half of the SSDs on the market still can't keep up with a pair of Raptors in RAID.
^I am a big fan of Raptors, but I'm running a Raid 0 SSD setup currently. We can always do better!
I really wish they didn't get rid of the 74GB Raptor. Those would be nice for Raid 0, as opposed to the 150GB's price point. Don't really need 300GB for OS, Games, and Appz. Why can't they make a smaller $100 Raptor?
I don't know where you're getting your ass-umption from, but I have one of our engineers machines running one single 128GB V series SSDNow drives and it goes from off to desktop in 35 seconds. The exact same machine with 300GB Raptors (two drives in a striped RAID0) takes about 55 seconds. Loading Solidworks on the SSD takes 6 seconds, on the Raptors it takes 13.
Also, fitting a pair of raptors is:
A) Noisy in a desktop
B) Won't fit in my laptop.
Yeah, people do forget sometimes, that SSD's are a handy drop in upgrade for laptops. They don't need to be used exclusively for desktops.
As for the Raid Raptors having a longer boot time, how much of that is from the Raid Controller detecting the array? Raid boot up times suffer because of that, but it does not neccessarily mean performance is worse. My Raid SSD setup takes longer to boot than a single SSD because I have to wait for the Raid controller to do its junk before Windows starts loading.
I wonder if these are RAID friendly, 4 of those in RAID 0 is getting me all hot and bothered.
4 of these in a raid 0 setup, a much better deal than 1 x-25m 160GB?!
I just bought a 34nm Intel X-25M 80GB for $245 from MacMall... I don't think I'll read about this, just in case it would give me buyer's remorse..
@ethana
It won't, an Intel drive for less than $300 is the best deal doing.
@Breex
Not going to happen, size has nothing to do with the cost of SSDs.
Also, the >4k random r/w for system files are why SSDs destroy HDDs for most tasks, not just booting.
@Jon Doe...
Buy an Intel 80GB drive, twice the size 3 times the price.
Actually, this is a rebranded Intel drive. It uses the same controller and nand as the 34nm X25 Gen2, just with half the number of nand chips as the 80GB, hence lower speed (especially sequential read).
4 of these in RAID has the potential to squash the 160GB X25 Gen 2. Looking forward to a benchmark of this scenario.
Correction:
Sequential is about 66% of Intel X25. Sequential write however is about 50%. Random write is about 85% and read is more than 90% of Intel's. Bit-tech has tested two SSDNow V 40s in RADI0 here: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/27/kingston-ssd-now-v-series-40gb-intel-x25-x/5
With 2xV40 you get about the same sequential write as one X25, but higher sequential write (30%) and random write (40%) and reads (not much).
That's with 2. With 4 I'd think it'll crush any other similarly priced setup ($340). From what I could glean from the review, the performance scale basically linearly.
You're right about these being re-branded Intel drives. However, since they're not "officially" Intel they don't get Intel firmware.
And at this point they don't get TRIM.
As far as RAIDing SSDs goes, unless you're not using them much, wiping and rebuilding the array monthly, or have 4 times more space than you need, the performance degradation caused by not being able to TRIM the drive is going to cancel out much of the speed advantage RAID brings.
Don't get too excited. Newegg is still price gouging on the Intel drives.
Yipppeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!
I just don't like the fact I can get a 500GB HD for that price, the increase in space is worth the inconvenience of a bit of loading alone.
Who cares? There's a little choice called don't buy it and GTFO. You've obviously never experienced a system with a newer SSD- it's sick. Feels like the whole system off a big ramdrive. I have a couple OCZ Vertex in Raid0 and everything is pretty much instant.
Seriously? "Solid state disc"? What disc?
just start ripping out your dvdrom drives in your laptops and put in a second drive and go hybrid. get a cheap $10-20 usb case for your dvd drive and you'll be fine.
Cool. Any sites you recommend that have instructions on doing that? I don't use the DVD in my lappie all that much - that seems like a good way to go.
Dear Engadget,
?
How about you start reporting the random write speeds, as those are the only numbers that matter with SSDs? I get it, you have to be corporate shills to keep the advertising dollars flowing, but you do nothing but hurt your reputation as a reliable source for hardware news by reporting only meaningless sequential stats.
Love, Nomecks
4 of these going raid 0 is going to be sweet. $320 bucks for 160 Gig of uberfast RAID0 lovin doesn't seem bad at all. I was hoping the big guys with thier big fast drives would come down enough to raid a couple of those suckers, but no thank you on 1200 bucks for 240 gigs going Intel sigh.
ssd need have two things TRIM and good random speed [ 4k 8k... blocks]
if not
while doing same task u wont see much differ
cos the random read and writes will mostly increase the time to complete
seq speed are good but which task need to open big file ?
just copying open rars and so on.... that is not much improvement on hdd [1tb and 500mb have good speed too]
and really don't worth waste so many cash for it