Conclusion:

When low capacity solid state drives started being more heavily promoted I couldn't see them being a practical solution. Sure, the prices were about as appealing as you could get with SSDs, but I wasn't sure 30GB was even enough to make them worth buying. Fast forward several months, and I now have a handful of 30GB-40GB SSDs in use not only as boot drives in desktop systems, but also as the sole drive in one laptop. Windows (7 or Vista in my case) can be installed with 60% or more of the drive's capacity still available for my additional programs, files, and with plenty of space to spare. You obviously can't load it up with games, movies, and other large items, but for certain situations 30GB is definitely enough.

The Kingston drive offers a respectable read speed (180MB/s sequential, max), while the write speeds are less than impressive (50MB/s sequential, max). The thinking is that read applications are far more typical in day-to-day usage, so if something had to be sacrificed in the name of saving money, that it should be write performance. While you can see the impact this degraded write performance has on the drive when compared to other SSDs, when compared to a traditional hard drive, this Kingston SSD dominates.



Comparing prices on the desktop upgrade kit shows that you are going to spend just over $100 for exactly what was covered in this review. But, if you don't need the handy accessories, you can get just the 30GB drive for about $10 less. Heading directly over to Newegg.com will get you a better price on the bare drive, but a slightly higher price on the upgrade kit. Shopping around finds that the price on the bare drive is as low as you might get for a 30GB SSD, and other competitive drives can only get close to its price after mail-in-rebates.

The bottom line is that the Kingston SSDNow V Series 30GB solid state drive is a budget conscious way to get your system up and running on an SSD, while still getting a decent performance boost over a traditional hard drive. That said, it earns the Bigbruin.com "Recommended" and "Good Value" awards.



Pros:

» Respectable read speeds
» Overall performance is just fine for most uses
» Competitively priced
» Bundle of accessories makes installation easy

Cons:

» Slow write speeds

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