Kingston's latest SSDNow V+ reviewed in 128GB flavor

Kingston's SSDNow V+ series is hitting the streets, and bit-tech.net has put it, and its new Toshiba controller, through the wringer. That new silicon offers TRIM support in Windows 7, intended to remove any lingering fears of performance degradation, and this drive has been graced with 128MB of internal cache to conquer random read and write performance. In general the review finds that the controller does its job and TRIM'd deletes don't have a major affect on performance, but there still was some degradation after 1TB worth of writes and deletes. Beyond that the included cache didn't seem to help random I/O performance, and in general the drive doesn't exactly dominate the benchmarks. So, if you've recently upgraded to something else and were feeling a bit of buyers' remorse, you're safe -- for now.

[MoonWalkerCTE Posted Feb 17th 2010 9:41AM]

Finally SSDs are beginning to support trim more and more so that the OS actually takes advantage of the SSD.

[YpoCaramel Posted Feb 17th 2010 9:45AM]

@MoonWalkerCTE According to what I've read from Anandtech, even after performance degradation without TRIM SSDs are much faster than their HDD counterparts are random read / writes, and that's true for this Kingston as well.

The problem with this drive is that the Vertex (and similar drives) is simply much faster at the same price and capacity, at least before the market corrects for it.

[michael Posted Feb 17th 2010 11:34AM]

@YpoCaramel I'd like to believe that, but my experience with the SSD on my 901 EEEpc tells differently. It has a 4GB onboard SSD, and a 16GB add-in SSD (OEM). I was using the 16GB for storage at first, then had installed WinXP onto it. Performance was TERRIBLE, frequent pauses while in use, during which the hard drive light would stay solid. As soon as the light went out, the system would finally respond.

Read the articles/reviews on Anandtech discussing SSDs, TRIM, and "dirty" SSD performance, and a light bulb clicked. I used a zero wipe utility to clear the 16GB drive, then re-installed Windows to it. Performance is VASTLY improved. Based on that experience, I will NOT buy a drive without TRIM support (the 1st gen SSD Now! drives), no matter how cheap it is.

[Billy Gun Posted Feb 17th 2010 9:56AM]

In 2025 I'll have a SSD in my Desktop, when a 8TB SSD will be U$ 130.

[Luffy Posted Feb 17th 2010 10:01AM]

@Billy Gun whoa man thats a pessimistic outlook, I'd hope we have much larger capacities in 15 years haha

[Billy Gun Posted Feb 17th 2010 11:02AM]

@Luffy

Yes, I am very pessimistic with SSD prices, I realy need tons of TB storage (I use Media Center stuff, HD videos, HD Tv recordings, Photos in RAW...), I will easy prefer a 2TB HDD over a 128gb SSD... evem if it's 2TB HDD over a 1 TB SSD...

I realy don't see the price get near so soon.

[paul34 Posted Feb 17th 2010 11:16AM]

@Billy Gun

WTF? Prices will fall faster than that, dude. Look at how much they've fallen so far after only having been out a few years; think about how much longer hard drives took. The pace of technology today compared to even 10 years ago is pretty crazy.

Now if only RAM would get cheaper. Seems like it does, and then they conveniently introduce a new standard meaning prices get reset, and then stop making the older ones so then those don't get any cheaper either. And with the predicted increase in prices of all computer components throughout 2010 and possibly 2011, it's not helping either.

[Billy Gun Posted Feb 17th 2010 1:16PM]

@paul34

Don't you remember the news that "SSD's Will Become Mainstream in 2010"? we are not even near that, How come in the year that "SSDs Will Become Mainstream" a 64Gb or a 80 Gb SSD is the price of 2Tb HDD? No way I'll buy SSD just for speed, I do Raid for that.

[bazookafx3 Posted Feb 17th 2010 10:00AM]

I get my SSD next week, I ask all of you to be jealous =]

[Old fogie late bloomer Posted Feb 17th 2010 10:20AM]

@bazookafx3

You b@st@rd! ;-)

[Luffy Posted Feb 17th 2010 10:00AM]

Let me know when I can get a premium 128gb SSD for under $200, till then I will just stick with my velociraptors `~`

[Old fogie late bloomer Posted Feb 17th 2010 10:21AM]

@Luffy

Yup, that's what I want too... I'll probably hold off on a desktop build until that happy dream becomes reality.

[Ducman69 Posted Feb 17th 2010 11:07AM]

@Luffy Get a RAID0 array of two 30GB SSDs for your OS/apps, and keep your games, videos, music, and movies on your storage drive.

Velociraptors are an extinct species! :D

[GeekPI Posted Feb 17th 2010 11:43AM]

@Luffy: I've found that once I moved all of my media content to a home server (2 TB), it became very advantageous to move my desktop and laptops to SSD drives. If you only have the OS and some programs, 80gig is a workable amount of space - and much more affordable for an SSD @ $200-240.

If you're storing the same data across several machines, it makes a lot of sense to go to a central storage solution; especially one with integrated backup and simple remote access. The massive boost in desktop/laptop performance was only a side benefit.

I look at my 15k scsi desktop now and think "Why are you so slow?"

[TheOtherJames Posted Feb 17th 2010 1:54PM]

@GeekPI

And that's how you use SSDs. Get one just big enough for your OS and applications, and use an HDD for data. You get the performance benefits of the SSD and the size benefits of the HDD. When you use BOTH types it's like bulk storage nirvana.

[Old fogie late bloomer Posted Feb 17th 2010 10:33AM]

"through the ringer"

I think the word you meant was "wringer". :-)

[TimStevens Posted Feb 17th 2010 10:34AM]

@Old fogie late bloomer Indeed! Fixed, thanks.

[FlasH Posted Feb 17th 2010 6:44PM]

Why does Samsung continue to sell to middlemen like Kingston? It makes no sense, whatsoever.