Kingston's SSDNow V Series of solid state drives was launched in the summer of 2009, and this new technology was made available to a greater audience thanks to the pricing. The V in "V Series" stands for value, and when the 64GB and 128GB drives were released they were the least expensive products on the market at those sizes, respectively.
While the price was impressive, the compromise made to get there was in performance. While compared to a traditional hard drive, these new SSDs were still fast, but compared to some of the higher end SSDs on the market, the 100MB/sec. read and 80MB/sec. write specifications lagged behind.
Kingston has a new product in the SSDNow V Series, and this time the price has been taken even lower, while the performance has been enhanced by using an Intel controller instead of a Toshiba or JMicron unit. This review is going to take a look at their SSDNow V Series 40GB solid state drive, as shown in the image above.
Before taking a closer look at the sample provided in one of Kingston's desktop upgrade kits, lets take a look at some of the published information available on the
V Series product page.
Features:
» Performance: enhances productivity; makes users more efficient
» Innovative: 2.5" form factor; uses NAND flash memory components.
» Silent: Runs silent and cool with no moving mechanical parts
» Reliable: less likely to fail than a standard hard drive
» Shock Resistant: No moving mechanical parts so the SSD handles rougher conditions.
» Supports S.M.A.R.T.: tells the user when a drive is about to fail
» Guaranteed: 3 year legendary Kingston warranty, 24/7 tech support
Specifications:
» Capacity: 40GB
» Storage Temperatures: -40°C to 85°C
» Operating temperatures: 0°C to 70°C
» Vibration Operating: 2.17G (7â€"800Hz)
» Vibration Non-Operation: 20G (20â€"2000Hz)
» Sequential Speed: Up to 170MB/sec. read; 40MB/sec. write
» Power Specs:
» Active: 0.15W (TYP)
» Sleep: 0.06W (TYP)
» Life expectancy: 1 million hours mean time before failure
» Part Number:
» SNV125-S2BD/40GB (desktop bundle)
» SNV125-S2/40GB (stand-alone drive)
The main thing we see is that this drive greatly increases the read performance over the previous V Series drives (from 100MB/s to 170MB/s), but also cuts the write performance in half (from 80MB/s down to 40MB/s). For a boot drive where most of the activities would be reads, this compromise just might work, but it will be interesting to see if 40MB/s becomes an issue for writes.
