Kingston 40GB SSDNow review
By Ben Drawbaugh 
posted December 2nd 2009 12:31PM
posted December 2nd 2009 12:31PM
Installation
PreparationWe added this drive to an existing PC, but our current system partition was an honest-to-goodness 40GB and this drive is actually 37GB, so we had to start out by shrinking it. The upgrade kit version includes imaging software, but not resizing software, so we followed the advice of our friends at Download Squad and used the free EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition software to resize it. Once that was over, we were only using about 21GB of our system drive, so this was as easy as installing the software and letting it do its magic and rebooting. But if you are using more space than this on your system drive, you'll have to rearrange some things to get the used space to under 37GB before you can resize it. We know you already have an external drive around for backups (right?) so we suggest you back everything (seriously, always backup everything before messing with your rig!) up until there is enough free space, then go on to the next step.
Physical installation
The new SSD is of the 2.5-inch form factor variety, but includes adapters to make it fit into any 3.5-inch drive bay. Our Dell XPS 420 had an extra unused floppy drive bay and unused SATA connection, so we set the drive in the bay without mounting it for review purposes; if we were to keep the drive, we'd definitely want it securely mounted. On the Dell motherboard the SATA ports are off by default, so we had to go into the BIOS and enable it. Finally, we booted the system and confirmed that it showed up in Computer Manager. Windows will try to initialize the drive, and we let it even though we planned to image over it later.
Copying existing data to the SSD
Assuming your system drive is 37GB or smaller, you need to image it over to the new SSD. If you bought the upgrade kit you can just boot from the included Acronis Drive Image boot disc and make your copy, otherwise you'll have to find your own imaging software. There are plenty of free options here, so many in fact that we won't go into great detail. In the case of the included Acronis disk, we couldn't get it to make a partition to partition image. So we just used Drive Image boot disc to backup our system partition to an image file on our 1TB internal disk. Then we used it again to restore the image to our new SSD. The last thing we had to do was to go into the BIOS and tell the system to boot from the SSD drive instead and we were off to the races.
Performance
We know this is getting to be a cliché but SSD technology brings new life to just about any computer. Now we'll leave the serious benchmarking to the experts, but beyond just going by the seat of our pants impressions, we did time a few common tasks to see the measurable improvements. While everything we tried was at least a little faster, the most noticeable was the time it took for our PC to sleep, which was 13 seconds instead of 48, with the time from login until the desktop appearing coming in second with an 18 second improvement. The time to launch new programs was greatly improved, but we're talking a second or two here, unless we were out of RAM. Want some brutal honesty? If you're thinking of buying RAM or an SSD, we'd recommend the SSD. We say that because page files are a fact of life in modern operating systems no matter how much RAM you have, and accessing a page file from an SSD drive is markedly faster. This is a difficult thing to benchmark, but believe us when we tell you that there is no mistaking the perceivable improvement when the page file gets used. One thing to consider about a smaller SSD like this is that it means you won't be able to leverage your new disk speed on most file copies or loading large media files for playback or editing. The SSD will help these tasks somewhat because your hard disk with your documents and media will be relieved of its OS, page file and application loading duties, but we're not sure how perceivable that is.Media Center PC performance
Media Center in Windows 7 is already much faster than it was in Vista, but we were excited to see if we'd notice an additional speed boost from an SSD drive. We tried a few different configurations -- such as setting the SSD to just be the Live TV buffer -- but honestly we really didn't notice any improvements. It seems that Media Center is loaded into memory anyways, so after the initial launch -- which evidently doesn't require much disk I/O itself -- things felt pretty much the same. Now the only time we've ever noticed any slow downs in Media Center (that were disk related, anyways) is when we recording five HD shows at once, but at 40GB, we could only record about 5 hours of material to this drive. For kicks, we copied a 30 minute HD show to it and scanned it for commercials with ShowAnalyzer, and it finished in 4 minutes instead of 8; unfortunately, the time it would take to copy the content to the SSD to be scanned would all but nullify the savings.
Conclusion
At less than $100, the Kingston 40GB SSD is a superb value and is certainly a solid system upgrade. If you're building a new system and can spare the extra cash, don't even think about it -- you won't regret having an SSD at the helm. The fact is there just aren't that many pieces of hardware that can offer this type of performance boost -- albeit only for certain tasks -- at this price. With all of that being said, at 40GB this isn't going to be the only hard drive in your PC, but if you do have room in your case and enough wiggle room in your budget for two drives, picking this one up seems like a no-brainer from here.
@James5mith
Thanks for the tip! I'm starting to get tired of Newegg's practice of jacking the prices on products when inventory drops. They have been really bad about their SSD and video card prices lately.
@FitFan
>jacking prices when inventory is low
>basic law of supply and demand
It's called economics 101. The fact that demand is getting high enough to warrant this is good- it means the ssd is becoming more mainstream.
@FitFan
Mine shipped out today. Can't wait to give it a run through on the HTPC.
I'd like to see some sort of relatively high speed SSD drive be made with an 8GB capacity for the express purpose of sticking a page file on it. I mean, I'm fine with the performance I get from my standard 7200rpm drive (8MB+ cache), but when that PF kicks in, I feel burned. I know that might be a niche product, but I think it would sell well enough.
Another thing would be for motherboard makers to integrate 8GB of flash onto the board directly, even if its not bootable.
@Guy
You mean, like ramdisks?
@Guy Kind of like Intel's Turbo memory?
http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/turbomemory/index.htm
@Guy
Why don't you just upgrade your RAM to 8+GB? Plain RAM is a ton cheaper than flash RAM and always will be.
@GeekPI Well that works...
@electrobrains I don't upgrade to 8GB of ram because my system can't handle it- while buying a new system would fix that, that costs far more than even an Intel 80GB SSD.
@Guy If that's what you really want there are already reasonable solutions out there. You'll want something that is long-lifed (because of all the writes) and fast. So you'll want an SLC-based SSD. These don't get very big because SLC is less dense/more expensive, but you don't care about that if you're just going to use it for your page file. Also SLCs are significantly faster than MLCs and last much longer (like 10x the number of write cycles).
Seems perfect for this. You can get an 8GB SLC-based SATA drive off newegg (say the Transcend TS8GSSD25S-S) for < $100. If you dig around I'm sure there are people out there doing this.
Not sure I see the point myself, but yes it might make your system faster and it might preserve the life of your MLC system drive for a bit. You'd want at least 3 drives in your system though--MLC boot/system, SLC page file, and rotating media storage.
Of course you have to account for SATA transfer speed too, my mobo only has a paltry two sata ports on it and they are only 1.5. So any performance gain is lost because my mobo is five years old and hp doesn't send out updates for it anymore (I still like that mobo though, it is in one of the last good compaqs and it has been faithful for quite a long time, it even runs windows 7 well). I mean I could be wrong, perhaps with that drive I could get a few more good years out off that board but I don't see the point when I could save my money and buy a new board that is at least 4x better and runs an 8x faster processor.
@joebob
If you have a spare PCIe slot, you might consider a SATA II controller card. You can get them for $25.
@nate345
About that, I only got 1 PCI-e slot (used by video card) and cheap Conventional PCI cards only supports 150. There are Conventional PCI sata II cards out there in the wild but I don't think i'll get amazing performance from them because of the limitations of Conventional PCI.
@joebob
Sounds like you need a new mobo more than anything else.
What would be great is a 250Gb ish Laptop HDD, with a small 10Gb SSD built in. The laptop could use the 10Gb for the OS and program files, and the rest for documents, music.
@Oli D I agree. I think that would be an outstanding idea. They should make a 500gb laptop HDD with a built in 20GB or so SSD for system and program files. Kind of like Intel's Turbo Boost.
Is this drive already discontinued? It's not listed on Kingston's V Series product page:
http://www.kingston.com/ukroot/ssd/v_series.asp
Nevermind... I somehow landed on the UK page. This drive is NOT discontinued:
http://www.kingston.com/ssd/v-series.asp
i'll take 2 for raid 0
Why don't you just upgrade your RAM to 8+GB?
@electrobrains Because that wouldn't work.
@electrobrains Go on, upgrade your ram to 8GB, I bet you won't even notice the difference in speed from the extra ram vs using this drive. I have 6gb of ram and didn't notice the increase over 2gb for desktop tasks.
Only problem is that $85 price point probably won't be found until Jan-Feb of 2010. Most places don't have it in stock and the places that do are trying to sell it for $130+ unless you happen to find a place with rebates which NewEgg had before but is now out of stock so.....
@InnocentEd That's what I'd been wondering. I keep hearing about this drive at a mythical $85 price point, but $130 is what I keep seeing. I'd get one at $85, but $130 for 40gb is too high, especially as an extra $15 will get you the 64gb version.
I did this with the 60GB SSD from Kingston on my hackintosh notebook. Now I keep all my media files on 2 external USB 1.5 TB drives.
is it the same for the 64gb version ? i'm talking about SNV125-S2/64GB and SNV125-S2BD/64GB (i'm still wondering about the difference of these 2 models..)
I prefer the 64gb size over the 40, so i'm hoping they are a good choice
C'mon Engadget, what about some specs, like real world read/write speeds, and whether it is MLC or SLC? These are basic things people want to know before plunging for an SSD.
Here, I did your job for you... the spec sheet says a 40MB/s write speed, which ain't very fast IMHO (real world value probably lower). It is also MLC construction, which any SSD aficionado will tell you has some serious long-term durability issues.
Seriously, this is an SSD in name only, and while its probably faster than your regular HDD, they will sell more of these purely for the "look at me I got a SSD" factor, rather than selling them to anyone serious about improving their computer's performance. It took some saving up, but I'm very happy with paying 3x the price for an M-Tron Mobi 1.8" SSD. The >100Mb/s read and write (real world values, not spec sheet propaganda), and SLC construction are well worth the extra.
@(Unverified)
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=4
"Only 5 devices means the Intel controller works in 5-channel mode, instead of 10-channel like the X25-M G2"
It's a "halved" X25-M G2 80GB system. Half the channels, half the capacity, roughly half of the speed. Kingston has been reselling Intel SSD's for sometime now. Unless it's an X25-E rebadge (which only come in 32GB and 64GB capacities) it's MLC.
Is this a Recession Antidote/Early Xmas Giveaway?
Ok then, why NOT?!?
;@b