Legit Storage Reviews
Kingston 30GB SSDNow V Series Boot Drive Review
| Manufacturer: | Kingston |
| Product: | Kingston 30GB SSDNow V Series Gen 2 Boot Drive |
| Date: | Mon, Mar 08, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Joe Evans - |
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Final Thoughts and Conclusions
The idea of an SSD boot drive like the Kingston 30GB V Series drive works well of a lot of users who just can’t dump a load of money into a drive but would really like to get rid of the HDD bottleneck in their system. You can see that Windows reports a total capacity availability of 27.9GB out of the 30GB total physically on the drive which is not much of a chunk allocated for drive maintenance as compared to some other drives which have been as much as 10-20%.
If you are running Windows 7 x64, you will fill up about half of the drive just with the OS alone depending on the amount of RAM you have. If you turn off the page file or at least reduce it, it will free up space reserved on the drive commensurate with the amount of RAM you have since the OS allocates drive space for it. Unless you have 12GB of RAM or more, I wouldn’t recommend turning this off completely – especially if you are using Photoshop or other apps that can use a very large amount of memory. Reducing the amount of drive space available should be OK and there are numerous articles around the web that debate the pros and cons of this. You can also move the page file to another drive. Turning off hibernation will also free up some space if needed.
Performance for this drive was right on with the expectations set by Kingston. The unfortunate part of that is the write speed, which at 50MB/s, falls below hard drive speed and frankly, is disappointing. There were some benchmarks that did show writes exceeding this but they still barely rival most platter drives. This boot was made for walking
(ok, bad pun). While you'll still see a nice performance boost by upgrading from an HDD in Windows and application loading, there are going to be some aspects of your daily use that you may see no change or even a loss in performance due to the writes. Such is life when you are only paying $110 (or $80 for the launch special) for a low capacity SSD.
While reads are decent and the Toshiba T6UG1XBG controller does support TRIM, it doesn’t show the write performance we would hope for. We also saw similar performance in the Western Digital's entry SSD which uses a JMicron controller. Employing a more cost-effective controller probably helped Kingston manage the low price point they are offering which is really going to attract buyers. Smaller drives tend to have lower performance anyway due to the lesser NAND density so that doesn't help much either. If you are interested, I would definitely recommend getting in on the initial $80 limited offer at launch as I expect stock to go quickly like we saw with the 40GB boot drives that launched in 2009.
Legit Bottom Line: For those looking to get an SSD but can’t afford the $4+/GB prices of most drives, the Kingston 30GB V Series boot drive is an attractive option due to its pricing which trumps the lackluster writes. You won’t see the performance of the more expensive drives but it should be an overall improvement over most hard drives and won't empty your bank account in the process.
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| Review Index |
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Page 1 - Kingston 30GB SSDNow V Series SSD
Page 2 - A Closer Look & Test System Page 3 - ATTO v2.41 & AS SSD Benchmarks Page 4 - HD Tune Pro v4.01 Page 5 - HD Tach v3.0.4.0 & CrystalDiskMark v3.0 Page 6 - PCMark Vantage Page 7 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions |
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