Reviews - Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB notebook kit solid-state drive review

[HEXUS]

Less than £100 with an external caddy and quality software, has Kingston got it right with its value 64GB SSD? We find out.

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[cjs150]

I can see only one use for this. Namely to use as a start up disc for OS and programs, all data and writing should be to a different disk, probably mechanical disc.

That way the problems of stuttering are minimal as you do very little writing to the disc.

I would like to see how this SSD performs in that configuration, say with Vista, couple of tabs of Firefox open and a Word document or two. If the end result is a snappier start up for all applications and no degradation in day-to-day running then for less than £100 that is pretty good value for me.

There is a downside for me with all these SSDs and the massive increase in disc transfer speed- at home everything is run of a standard 100MB/sec ethernet router, will I be swamping this with 2 or 3 HD streams - it was never a problem with mechanical discs as they were the bottleneck, with SSDs this is not the case. All my PCs have standard gigbit connections - I guess this means network manufacturers will need to produce gigabit routers for the home market now (the house is on a wired network, I never did trust wireless)

[mikerr]

Lol, 100 MegaBITS ethernet = 10 megaBYTEs/sec.

I'd hope your HDDs were capable of more than that

Gigabit = 100megaBYTE/sec - most spinny HDDs can't max that out for long, but an SSD can.

Any SSD destroys a standard HDD in real world usage.

[chis]

This is tempting simply because of the massive increase in boot time. Surely putting applications on it would benefit as well?

[cjs150]

Miker:

I always get my bits and bytes wrong when talking about ethernet!

The point remains. All my movie collection is ripped down to HDD - I have a good quality RAID to keep up. For standard def movies this is not a major issue although I probably would not want to run more than 2 movies at same time. Of course I am now moving to HD movies. If I move to SSD from HDD then the disks are no longer a bottleneck but the network and router will be.

[Funkstar]

Of course I am now moving to HD movies. If I move to SSD from HDD then the disks are no longer a bottleneck but the network and router will be.

BluRay has a maximum data rate of 54mbit/sec. Any decent RAID setup should be able to maintain two streams of that. My RAID-5 arrays can transfer at around 120MB/sec (yes, 120 megabytes/sec or about 960megabits/sec)

108mbit/sec should be no problem for anything running on a gigabit network. I would say that even right now, your network is your bottle neck rather than the mechanical hard drive. No need for SSDs in this usage case.

[cjs150]

Cheers. I had a feeling that it was time to upgrade the old 8 port Linksys cable router. Any good ideas for a 5-8 port gigabit cable router that will not cost too much

[Funkstar]

Best starting a new thread for that mate

[mercyground]

Its tempting to replace the boot in the other halfs laptop with this SSD but problem is that it limits her space. I'd prefer to put a 128gb in hers really. Also with the price of SSD's falling rapidly I'm going to leave it for a while. Still its all good with how things are going.

As someone commented above, it would be worth replacing a mechanical with an SSD just for pure boot/apps boost. Just keep a nice Samsung 1tb for movies/big storage. Thats fast enough for most things.

/off topic. Only problem i have is i5's are out and its put the kybosh on me getting an AMD machine as the performance is awesome. Thou... if it causes a price war, i may just buy a cheap dual core with 4gb and treat it as disposible.

[simonw]

Pleased that JMicron have fixed the stuttering problems with this controller, even though it is not the SSD controller of choice these days. It's a decent budget offering from Kingston, but I'm not a fan of synthetic benchmarks, I would have liked to have seen a few more real life benchmarks apart from the Vista boot and Far Cry loading times.

[Roobubba]

I don't mean to be disparaging, but, at times, the hexus recommendation score really does seem like a 'random number between 50 and 80'. I'm sure it's quite difficult to arrive at values which most people will agree on, and I don't envy the job of doing so (especially when people like me then chirp up...), but the review didn't seem to give a glowing reference to the drive, so I was surprised to see a score which, comparing against other values given with more favourable reviews, seems a little on the high side.

This point aside, good review and interesting to read. I've currently got a X25-M (G1) 80GB disk and am keeping an eye on the market with interest to see what the next generation will be giving us!

Cheers,

Roo

[zag2me]

How can you possibly give this drive 65%??

It's the slowest one in the test and uses a really poor controller, recommending it as a "safe buy" is pushing it.