Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSD Review

[Apoptosis]

Kingston today announced the release of the SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive, the latest addition to its V (Value) family of solid-state drives (SSD). This drive will cost a mere $84.99 after rebates when it is launched on November 9, 2009. You'll be shocked to learn that inside this drive is an Intel 2nd Generation controller and 34nm MLC NAND! This might be the bargain of the year when it comes to storage.

The idea of having one drive as a boot drive and another drive for storage is nothing new. Kingston is the first company to bring to market an SSD for this task, though, and we must say that it is an interesting solution. With the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive available for as low as $84.99 after rebates it really might be one of the most cost-effective ways to improve any desktop’s boot, shutdown and application load times. It's not every day a low-cost upgrade solution comes to market that makes such a big performance improvement, so we can see how this SSD will breathe new life into existing desktop computers and workstations in homes and offices around the world.

The drive's performance was nothing short of amazing as we were seeing sequential write speeds over 230MB/s in popular benchmarks like HDTach. The drive is rated for a sequential read speed of up to 170MB/s, so this was a nice surprise. The Achilles heel of this product would have to be its write speeds. The drive comes rated at up to 40MB/s for the sequential write speed and that is nothing earth shattering and to be honest, most hard drives can beat that. The 4K random write speeds on the other hand were the best that we have ever seen...

Article Title: Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSD Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1111/1/
Pricing As of November 9th, 2009: $85 After Rebates for a limited time
DIGG URL: http://digg.com/hardware/The_SSD_That_Y ... B_Boot_SSD

[gwolfman]

Nice find! I'll definitely be waiting for the 80GB version. Any news on 80GB capacity from Kingston?

[Apoptosis]

Nice find! I'll definitely be waiting for the 80GB version. Any news on 80GB capacity from Kingston?

Intel has not made any comment to the press about any 80GB or 160GB Intel Gen 2 drives coming out anytime soon. This was a unique product that Kingston helped develop in conjunction with Intel according to what I have been told. I'm fairly certain that Intel will have a 40GB Gen 2 drive in the near future though, but that is a guess as Intel hasn't confirmed anything.

[gwolfman]

I'll definitely recommend this for people I talk to. It's less than 2x's the price I'd recommend in new, inexpensive PCs anyways (about $50 SATA HDD vs $85 SSD).

[shaxs]

I am tempted..... but 40 gb just may not be enough for what I want to do.

[Digital Puppy]

I am tempted..... but 40 gb just may not be enough for what I want to do.

Which is why I'm buying two for RAID-0 use. Win7 takes up about 20gigs of space and I will pair it with a 1TB or 1.5TB secondary drive.

[shaxs]

I am tempted..... but 40 gb just may not be enough for what I want to do.

Which is why I'm buying two for RAID-0 use. Win7 takes up about 20gigs of space and I will pair it with a 1TB or 1.5TB secondary drive.

Yeah.... I am afraid of raid 0. Ive had it fail and lost all my data. I currently have 3x750gb in raid 5. I think im going to wait a little longer for price to come down and performance to go up a little.

[FZ1]

IMO, with SSD's there is no need for RAID 0. You need a decent RAID card to really see the performance difference and those aren't cheap. Obviously in this case, the RAID 0 is to create a larger volume but 40GB is plenty big for the OS and a set of core apps. I had Win 7, Photoshop CS4, Lightroom 2, Nero, Arcsoft Theater and a few other apps on a 30GB Vertex with 5GB or so left over.

[Apoptosis]

IMO, with SSD's there is no need for RAID 0. You need a decent RAID card to really see the performance difference and those aren't cheap. Obviously in this case, the RAID 0 is to create a larger volume but 40GB is plenty big for the OS and a set of core apps. I had Win 7, Photoshop CS4, Lightroom 2, Nero, Arcsoft Theater and a few other apps on a 30GB Vertex with 5GB or so left over.

Yeah, but with a setup like this in RAID 0 I think you would be talking 300+MB/s Read and ~80-85MB/s Write and in a RAID 0 stripe you'd get 80GB for $170... That performance is insane if you think about the price versus performance. The 40GB boot drive can't to TRIM right now anyway and you can't do that in RAID, so you don't lose any features by picking two up.

[Apoptosis]

This drive is supposed to be coming out today...

Nothing on Newegg yet though...

Just a heads up if anyone wanted to try and get in on the $85 AR price.

[XstollieX]

Any word on what the price before rebate is?

*nevermind found it at kingston

Part Number Capacity and Features MSRP (U.S. only)
SNV125-S2/40GB 40GB 2.5" SATA SSD (stand-alone drive) $ 115.00
SNV125-S2BD/40GB 40GB 2.5" SATA SSD (desktop bundle) $ 130.00

[DL126]

Just ordered 3 of 'em.
My Tiger Direct rep found them somewhere or another.
Price was just a few $ over 100 w/o rebate.

[Apoptosis]

Where you get them from?

Both TigerDirect and Newegg don't show them yet and I thought the $85 after a $30 rebate price was only good at newegg.

[DL126]

I think she said they were coming direct from Kingston.
I really don't know for sure.

As for being on the website ... that really doesn't matter.
If it's not on the site, that only means that Tiger doesn't have it in stock.
My rep can usually still find whatever I'm looking for and have it drop shipped to me.

Rebate ....
Don't know about that. Didn't ask.
I just told her that if it was less than $150 .... I needed 3 of 'em.

[Apoptosis]

Cool... trying to pick up a pair here for myself... hehe

[DL126]

Oh ... btw
Wherever it was that she found them ... they only had 6 in stock.

[Digital Puppy]

Found some at CompSource here for $107. Checking on the rebate...

[Apoptosis]

must have raised the price:

40gb Ssdnow V-Series Sata2 2.5
Our Price: $110.00
Mfr. Part: SNV125-S2/40GB
Usually Ships: Same Day
In Stock: 6

[Apoptosis]

Nov 11 - Kingston (Intel) 40GB Kingston SSD Shellshocker (maybe)

Just got Newegg's Shellshocker sneakpeak.

index_5b.jpg (37.77 KiB) Viewed 1385 times

And wala.. look at that. What looks like Kingston's new budget Intel X25M-G2 SSD.

They chopped the face off but you can definitely read from the pic "40GB" and an obvious resemblance to the Kingston.

Pricing NOT available (subject to closing?), just a big heads up for people who are intending on jumping on it. Launch date was supposed to be today the 9th but I haven't seen it on the site yet. Availability should be the same starting from 12AM (double shellshocker) and I'll be there refreshing.

Saw this on another forum... hum... Wonder what they are doing here.

[Digital Puppy]

Is that EST?? Oh, that's the date...11/11/09???