Kingspec SSD, are they any good?

Hi Springfield. I am doing exactly the same. I have bought a 16GB SSD Pata from Kingspec also. I have Windows XP home edition I want to put on it. Please can you advise how and where and when exactly you "do the 4K block alignment when installing Win XP"? Would really appreciate it as I need to do the same thing please.

 

Here are some pretty good instructions:
Guide RAID / Non-RAID Partition Alignment for max performance

There is a site thessdreview.com that has a lot of good info, beginner and advanced, but they seem to be off-line at the moment.

The easy way: I use a hard drive cloning tool called HD Clone, and the latest version has a check box to do a 4K alignment on the target drive.

 

Thank you.

 

BTW , welcome to the forum. Click on the link in my sig for thessdreview. Great site and they would be more than happy to help you out.

 

Words to the Wise:

I wanted to replace the 40gb drive on my eight-year-old Dell D500. I bought two 64gb pata KingSpec drives ($250). I try to keep good backups, and I like to keep a mirrored version of what I'm using in case of some type of catastrophe (serial virus, crash, etc). That's why I purchased two drives.

Well, the boot performance greatly improved, but both drives failed within a month after I purchased them.

I had backups of most everything, with the exception of a handful of Excel, Word, and Outlook files that were only on the ssd, and I couldn't retrieve.

Although I should have a 6 month warranty, I will probably not take advantage of it because like most people, I have quite a lot of personal information (account numbers, passwords, etc) that I just cannot take a chance on leaving my possession.

I could in no way recommend these drives to anyone, and instead of trying anything like this again, I will probably just pay the money for a new laptop.

 

@DesertFan

Can you post the model number of the drives you purchased & the seller.

Thanks.

o.g.

 

My drives are KingSpec SSD 2.5" Pata 64gb. The model number on the label is:
KSD-PA25.1-064MJ.

I prefer not to say anything about the seller, as I really think he is just the middle man, and is not the actual manufacturer. I really think I just threw away money on some junk

 

There's BAD NEWS & BAD News, which do you want first?

There are forum members who are "Up to Speed" & those of us who are still on the "Learning Curve" in the SSD arena. The former are suggesting that there are still major issues even with the latest generation MLC drives, so I'll take their comments on board. With regards to your drives, not only are they first generation MLC,(iffy, iffy, iffy)but they use the first generation Jmicron (JMF602) Controller, which has it's own issues.

I've still not "Dipped my Toe" but I'm aware that Kingspec offered an alternative to the JMF602 controller which is the Silicon Motion SM2235. It would be useful if someone with the Kingspec SLC/JMF602 or SLC/SM2235 gave us an update on their findings.

Note; neither the Nand Flash or the Controllers are manufactured by Kingspec,will that stop them getting a slating?

Doing your "Home Work" is the way forward, & to use a quote from Crusty ol' TinkerDwagon; "you don't ALWAYS get what you pay for, but you DO always pay for what you get". Which is not much consolation for DesertFan.

I can hear the bells chiming, so chime in with your up-dates.

o.g.

 

There are still a few 8GB and 16GB PATA SLC drives on the market, but the 16's are getting harder to find. A year or two ago there were 32GB PATA SLC drives on the market (Transcend I think ~$300ish), but those have gone the way of the beak nosed weasel.

I would try to avoid any MLC drives if at all possible, they are temptingly less expensive, but you get lower performance and reliability.

For some reason the filter on this website blocks squido o links. But I have an old article on the website relating to SSD optimizations.

Just remove the underscore to access the article:

squ_idoo.com/ssd-optimization-and-information

(If I am violating some forum rule feel free to erase this post)

Kingston drives are rebranded Intel SSD's however their lack of firmware support makes their lower cost not worth it in my opinion.

Top of the line drives at the moment:
20GB Intel SATA ~$120
8GB Transcend PATA ~$90-120
16GB Transcend PATA ~$160-$200 (If you can find one)

 

There's some very good choices still available in 2.5" PATA form. The Renice E7 below recommended as a native PATA solution bringing a nice performance boost while keeping power consumption low. The bridged solution bring with them at least another 0.5W usage to run the bridge chip. So on order of recommendation:

Renice E7 2.5" PATA SSD (Eastwho EWS720 native PATA controller)

OWC Mercury Legacy Pro 2.5" PATA SSD (Sandforce SF1222 + sata-to-pata)

Runcore ProIV 2.5" PATA SSD (Indilinx BF + Jmicron sata-to-pata)

MyDigitalSSD 2.5" PATA SSD (controller=??, performance specs look like Indilinx BF + sata-to-pata)