Kingston SSDNow V-Series Notebook Upgrade Kit Review

[ernstloeffel]

maybe you then didn't yet hit the degradation barrier. i have reinstalled my system a few times and had my system ssd nearly completely filled up several times. it's just a question of time when the drive will degradte. but it unfortunately definifively will sooner or later. that's why i'd never buy a jmicron ssd again, but rather recommend a samsung 128gb ssd, which you can get for just ~ 50 bucks more - with alot more performance.

a sata/ata/usb adapter cable costs about 10 dollars at ebay.

seriously, it's a nice performance upgrade in short/mid term. but in the long run it's really a waste of money, and this has been covered by money reviews before (like anandtech did). i was so stupid to not believe it, and was fascinated by the performance upgrade at first. now i regret that i just wasted my money and didn't listen to those advises to advoid the drives.

[Citizen86]

I really like the looks of SSD drives and the direction they are going... I'm still probably going to wait a year though for prices to come down more and maybe capacity to go up a bit.

[chuck232]

maybe you then didn't yet hit the degradation barrier. i have reinstalled my system a few times and had my system ssd nearly completely filled up several times. it's just a question of time when the drive will degradte. but it unfortunately definifively will sooner or later. that's why i'd never buy a jmicron ssd again, but rather recommend a samsung 128gb ssd, which you can get for just ~ 50 bucks more - with alot more performance.

a sata/ata/usb adapter cable costs about 10 dollars at ebay.

seriously, it's a nice performance upgrade in short/mid term. but in the long run it's really a waste of money, and this has been covered by money reviews before (like anandtech did). i was so stupid to not believe it, and was fascinated by the performance upgrade at first. now i regret that i just wasted my money and didn't listen to those advises to advoid the drives.

Yeah, performance may degrade eventually, but I've reformatted twice and have filled the drive up to ~90% each time, hence the reasoning behind the upgrade for size only. Haven't noticed any slowdown yet. Perhaps benchmarks would say otherwise though.

The 128GB Samsungs are about twice the price of the 128GB Kingston in Canada ($400 versus $210), which made the choice relatively easy.

[link1313]

Lets not kid ourselves here, until Intel lowers the price of the amazing X25 the masses will not start buying.

The read times are a joke, the Intel X25 is over 2.5 times faster in real world applications.

[Citizen86]

How many of the masses are doing research on SSD's right now? The masses buy $500 acer laptops and are satisfied *shrug*

The masses will start buying when SSD's are commonly sold with notebooks.

[Jerry Jackson]

Sorry for the delay in getting these figures posted. My wife and daughter wanted my attention during the Friday before the 4th of July and IOMeter doesn't like partitioned storage drives.

In any case, since sequential read and write speeds, aren't good indicators of potential lag/stutter, I used IOMeter to examine the maximum random read and maximum random write speeds to reveal any potential lag/stuttering with small file sizes. For this test, I set IOMeter to 100% random commands of 4K size for read and write. These numbers should therefor represent the worst case scenario for any SSD or HDD with small file random reads and writes.

I didn't have a ton of drives available for comparison, and since IOMeter required me to remove any partitions from the drives I didn't want to destroy the data (or have to back it up) on multiple drives. I picked a 7200rpm notebook hard drive and a 10,000rpm desktop hard drive for performance comparisons.

The lower the score ... the better the performance.

	Maximum Random Read Response Time	Maximum Random Write Response Time
128GB Kingston SSDNow V-Series	3.76ms	244.24ms
320GB Western Digital Scorpio Black Notebook HDD	67.88ms	69.91ms
300GB Western Digital Velociraptor Desktop HDD	28.74ms	31.13ms

Obviously, the Kingston V-Series SSD is extremely fast when it comes to random read performance, but the random write speed shows the Achilles Heel of the JMicron-based controller. We didn't have any other SSDs in our office with the JMicron controller, but after looking online at other sites it appears that other JMicron-based SSDs are even slower -- sometimes between two and three times slower than the Kingston V-Series in terms of random write performance -- and that's where the other SSDs start to show lag and stutter. Yes, 240+ milliseconds looks bad in print, but doesn't reflect lag/stutter in real life use ... at least not at this point in the life of this SSD.

Again, the team here at NBR will be bringing you more SSD coverage based on long-term testing ... our goal is to share "real life" performance results over time to show whether SSD performance and reliability drops after months of use rather than just using synthetic benchmarks to simulate the worst case scenario.

[Jlbrightbill]

Do you have the screenshots from IOMeter? MB/s and IOPS are more important than maximum response time, although the maximum response time is useful.

Thanks again for the time!

[goofball]

Again, the team here at NBR will be bringing you more SSD coverage based on long-term testing ... our goal is to share "real life" performance results over time to show whether SSD performance and reliability drops after months of use rather than just using synthetic benchmarks to simulate the worst case scenario.

Thanks. That's what matters to me. I own the 64GB version of this drive, and have done multiple things that I would think would induce stutter (downloading 5-6 torrents at 800kb/sec combined while watching xvid video, or unrarring 700mb files while surfing the web with 5-6 active tabs in firefox) and it just hasn't stuttered. If it does what I want it to, i don't care what a benchmark will tell me is wrong with the drive. It's not about ignorance, it's about the drive not disappointing. And I love how the laptop is now silent as opposed to having the 7200.3 drive inside.

[Red_Dragon]

HM ive been looking at a 64GB SSD myself, Possibly just to keep the OS on. But this has me intrigued i have 2 HDD slots an am only using one i dont think it would be too bad to add this drive.

[mullenbooger]

Kingston 138.99, OCZ vertex is 199.99. I'd probably spend the little bit extra and get the vertex. You could also get a samsung drive for under 200.