Reviews - Kingston SSDNow 40GB SSD review. Desktop and netbook performance

[HEXUS]

A 40GB SSD boot drive for £70? Sounds tempting.

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[Zhaoman]

I am pleasantly surprised by these results. Depending on how things go I could well pick up one of these next summer for a boot drive in the other PC

[chis]

Waiting on TRIM support. Otherwise, this will likely be the next boot drive in my system, and I'll likely get it ready to do a fresh install of Win7 Pro. (Main workstation is still on the RC)

[McPhee]

Decision made, I'm definitely getting one when they launch. Thanks Hexus! My current HDD gets 5.5 in WEI and it is a noticeable problem, it takes a few seconds to launch apps and boot time is well over a minute.

No TRIM support is a shame, but hopefully it'll appear in a firmware update somewhere down the line. If not then simple competition will mean in 12 months time we'll have faster, higher capacity drives with TRIM support at this price. I'll just upgrade to one of those.

[Champman99]

It should get TRIM support, I reckon it might be worth waiting for the X25-X from Intel though, which is identical to this but will probably have faster/better support than for a third party clone.

Then again it might also have a higher price. I have got an X25-M for my desktop and really want something cheaper for my laptop for weight/power/speed reasons, I just have this nagging feeling that 40GB wont be enough for me, W7+Office Enterprise must be a fair whack, hibernate file, various other bits and bobs, and enough free as so not to affect the speed. I reckon 64 is really the minimum I could use in the laptop, for a desktop i guess its a bit easier as you have the additional drives (and I appreciate this is how this drive is being marketed)

Anyway, I'm suprised intel allowed this to be released before their own version, strange one.

[Zhaoman]

No Trim support affects write speed only so it should still be perfectly adequate as an OS drive in a desktop PC. The lack of Trim isn't a big drawback for me anyway.

[koocha]

Thanks Hexus, have been waiting for this. Looks like it'll speed me up! got a Seagate something or other that's 5.9 in Win 7 and is letting my system down. When I get this it'll jump up to 6.9 (then time to upgrade my graphics card (8800GTS))

[Salazaar]

Originally Posted by Zhaoman

No Trim support affects write speed only so it should still be perfectly adequate as an OS drive in a desktop PC. The lack of Trim isn't a big drawback for me anyway.

How much of a difference does Trim make to the example you've given, a desktop PC using an SSD as it's main boot drive?

[alpha channel]

Well after installing Win7 HP on my media centre I'm somewhat underwhelmed by it's loading speed of over a minute (haven't timed it exactly but XP MCE was a darn sight quicker to boot and get into Media Centre) I was considering something a bit nippier for a boot drive for it. This looks pretty much what I was after without breaking the bank (well, it's either this or a 64GB Samsung PB22-J and this'll save more than few quid).

[Zhaoman]

Originally Posted by Salazaar

How much of a difference does Trim make to the example you've given, a desktop PC using an SSD as it's main boot drive?

http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=22

Ah found it If you scroll down you can see a chart of the performance of 'random writes' and 'random reads' of various drives in a 'new' and 'well-used' state. This is without TRIM support.

He doesn't include the figures for random reads for drives in a new state however... I assume this is because TRIM commands only affect write speeds so theoretically there would be no difference between read speeds no matter the condition of the drive. The earlier pages explain how TRIM works too and why only write speeds suffer in the lifetime of a drive without TRIM.