Hardware Kingston SSD NOW V+Series 64GB SSD review

Kingston is a big name when it comes to memory, but not as well known when it comes SSDs. Boasting a Samsung drive controller, could Kingston's latest offering, the SSD NOW V+ 64GB change that? We fire up the benchmark rig and find out.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/16/kingston-ssd-now-v-series-64gb-ssd-review/1

 

The Samsung controller is still a letdown

Ah well, the OCZ Agility series is pretty decent value.

 

Couldn't this be solved by making the SSD you windows/cache drive, while installing your games on a "normal" harddrive along with your data?
(I anyway never install my games under C:\program files...)

Xir

 

Yers, but then you don't get lightning-quick game level loads - I guess it depends on how much gaming you do, and how much you hate the waiting for levels to load.

 

Looks pretty impressive for the money. Is there a Crucial M225 128GB review on the way?

 

I've been trying to decide what's the better choice (for gaming) out of the X25-M or one of the Indilinx SSDs... Anyone got any thoughts they want to share?

 

we're waiting for the Windows 7 firmware update. It's an Indilinx based drive for cheap tbh, and if you can stand to wait a week or two for firmware updates over the Vertex, it's the best Indilinx drive - they're all the same after all.

 

Indilinx Indilinx Indilinx

The new firmware (available now to OCZ vertex users) enables TRIM support too, so excellent performance maintenance in Windows 7. We tested both the old and the new X25-Ms for Custom PC's labs test, and while they have the best random write speeds (30+MB/s) theier sequential write speeds are cack - 80MB/s is slower than a hard disk.

The Intel drives also loaded the Crysis level a couple of seconds slower than the Indilinx based drives. While I know the Intel drives have their fans, I'd take superior real world and massively faster sequential writes over un-noticeably faster random writes any day.

 

i want an ssd so bad. thing is i'm not about to pay more than about this price, but i'd be wanting at least 100gb. looks like i'll be skipping a generation.

 

Ah ok cheers Baz. The Intel has the advantage of coming in at 80GB at the ~£170 point where the various Indilinx types seem to be 60-64GB for a similar price, and I'm don't have the £££ at the moment to move up to the 120-128GB versions... But I guess performance wins this particular race

 

OK maybe im missing something but a "Kingston Technology 2.5 inch 128GB SATA2 SSDNow V-Series Drive " on amazon costs "£167.19 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. " sorry for the advertising but SSDs prices change by the minute and even though this one is on back order (upto a month apparantly) thats still a heck of a lot cheaper than any other one ive seen on this site.
And yes ok theyre indilink or whatever but so what, whatever you buy in new technology you'll get bugs, just depends on how much you want to spend to find out those bugs.

 

Is 60 gigas ACTUALLY not enough for WIn 7? I have a 25 gig partition for my XP with some ranom, non-essential programs installed there as well, and i still have over 8 GB of space left.

 

That's the V Servies that uses the old JMicron controller, not the V+ that uses the superior Samsung. The standard V series is completely rubbish, as as such is priced to ship, although I'd feel sorry for anyone foolish enough to grab one - time to write 1.6GB of ISO files? 46 seconds (36MB/s). Maximum random write latency? 1615ms (yes, that's 1.6 seconds!).

I'll admit they're confusingly named though - it'd be easy to get mixed up, especially as the drives are worlds apart in terms of performance.

 

The one on this site is V+

 

**Cheers, Fixed**

 

I edit video for a living.

The thought of an OS randomly grabbing hard disks outside your control is... well, I was going to say "very worrying", but in actual fact, it's a complete deal breaker.

I presume this, along with whatever other new stuff they've dreamed up, will go on the list of Things To Switch Off Immediately After Install. Honestly, since windows 98 the only user experience thing that's actually changed, with a slight nod to stability, is the amount of crap I have to turn off on install.

 

wrong thread there phil?

 

You just pressed my "OS knows best" button.

Again can we turn off this "randomly grabbing hard disks" thing?

 

Im posting this from windows 7 on a 60 gig partition, and it runs just fine. Mind you the only things I have installed are security stuff, flash et al for browsing, drivers, some stuff for VNCing to work, and DEFCON for when I cant be arsed to VNC to work.

Probably he means that 60g isnt enough for W7 and your Steam folder

 

You what?