News - Kingston puts SSD acceleration within reach of the masses with 40GB SDDNow V S

[HEXUS]

£70 for four times the performance of a regular desktop hard drive, says Kingston.

Read more.

[shaithis]

£70 for 40GB....

Thats £140 for 80GB.

Slightly cheaper then the Intel drive but performing noticably below it.....can't see how this represents value TBH.

[dangel]

The intel 40g drive has similar specs - but will it destroy this one on random read/writes which is the only relevant info for a OS drive?

(and how much will the new intel drive cost in the uk?)

[dreemteem]

Only seems like it would be worthwhile for those who want to install an OS on the drive, then sit and show it off to people. Having no room to install any useful programs, it will then be shunted off into a cupboard somewhere.

So, much like buying a netbook then.

[dangel]

Ah, reading round - this is an intel drive in disguise ((Intel Gen 2 Controller, 34nm Intel MLC NAND, 32 Cache). Bad news is there is no TRIM support on the drive as of yet (the intel one will have this right away) which is a pain. Random reads/writes are (as always good) and one review posted read speeds of 230mb/sec which is way over spec.

Incidentally, 40gb is plenty for a few systems (i've got two that would fit the bill).

[badass]

40Gb must be good fro a media center PC that's connected to a network with another PC/NAS on it.

[Noxvayl]

Only seems like it would be worthwhile for those who want to install an OS on the drive, then sit and show it off to people. Having no room to install any useful programs, it will then be shunted off into a cupboard somewhere.

So, much like buying a netbook then.

LOL, am I right in thinking you don't rate an OS as a useful program? If so that's a bit silly really.

--------------------------------------------

I can easily fit all my applications(some 20+ programs, excluding the windows live essentials) and Windows(7/Vista/XP) into a 40Gb hard drive. That would improve my system response times by a considerable amount and benefit me greatly.

A 40Gb SSD would be a really nice upgrade for lots of people, specially with 1Tb drives being so cheap for general storage. If you want a better gaming experience you are better off splashing out on faster RAM rather than faster HDD.

[McPhee]

Very funny, Kingston! You just had to do it, didn't you? You waited until I only just finished installing Windows and adding all of my files and programs back in to announce this!

I'll be popping down an order as soon as they go on sale, it's exactly what I've been waiting for. I built a rig up in an SG05 and to be honest having a 3.5" drive in there is a very bad idea, combine with a big passive CPU heatsink and a 4850 and there's very little room for airflow. Over the summer this left me with some bad overheating trouble so I swapped the 3.5" drive for a WD Caviar Blue. Temps dropped 10'C, but the drive is SLOOOOOW! Popping the OS on this thing should solve that problem. The WD can then be used as a storage/games drive, plenty of places to shove a 2.5" drive in the SG05 without messing up the airflow

[TooNice]

At £1.75/GB (not much cheaper than larger capacity Intel can be found), I won't be rushing out to buy one. It's not enough for all my app, or at best, it won't much space for future applications that I may want to install. Not convinced that my media centre PC would benefit that much from it either.

[Traajel]

I've been looking for exactly this sort of thing - a (relatively) low cost, low capacity SSD to be a quick/quiet drive to boot my OS and a couple of very select apps from. Just got to save some pennies (it could happen... honest guv!) and hope some other manufacturers come along with the same sort of thing to get the prices down even further. Or if not, at least hopefully a firmware update will enable TRIM...

Out of interest, does anyone who has used an SSD have any comment about whether you can hear any electrical whine coming from them? Are some drives better than others for this?

[format]

I think I might get one for my HTPC, and put the 1TB drive from that into an external enclosure.

[chis]

Need....This...!! My main workstation is currently booting off a tremendously sluggish 250GB Samsung that might be quiet... but Win7 takes about a minute to reach the desktop!

[scaryjim]

... sluggish 250GB Samsung ... Win7 takes about a minute to reach the desktop!

That's a pretty poor hard drive! My Win 7 install boots faster than that off a 40GB IDE hard drive! (and yes, that would make this SSD perfect for my system - but I think for now I'll be sticking for something about half the price with 8x the capacity ). I will almost definitely be trying to talk work into getting me one of these as a primary HD for my new workstation though... assuming performance is significantly better than the larger V-series SSDs...

[chis]

That's a pretty poor hard drive!

It was fine when I first installed the RC, but I'm not inclined to blame it entirely on the drive itself. It sits there chugging away at "welcome" for a good 20-30 seconds, and this has increased every time I've installed ATI's bloody Catalyst drivers. Noticed the same behaviour on my GF's Acer laptop running XP.

My Win7 install takes less than 30GB with a few apps installed - the rest on another partition. Just give me TRIM support and a 40GB SSD and I'd be happy!

[crossy]

Only seems like it would be worthwhile for those who want to install an OS on the drive, then sit and show it off to people. Having no room to install any useful programs, it will then be shunted off into a cupboard somewhere.

Sorry to disagree, but 40GB is enough space for a 'usable' system - okay, probably not if you want to slap on a shedload of MP3/MP4's and then install MS-Office-2007 Pro. On the other hand I've installed webservers with about that much space (blade-based). Oh, and with my geek glasses on I'd point out that 40GB is usable for a Linux system, (inc office apps etc) and a good selection of MP3's.

That out of the way, I thought that the current wisdom was that only a prat or someone very short of physical space had an SSD as their only storage, and it was better paired with a proper HDD for data storage with the SSD kept for OS only, (although why do MS make it so difficult to do this?).

So, much like buying a netbook then.

So can I take it that you've got a netbook going cheap then? If so, I'd be interested...

Bob

[Funkstar]

I think this would be good for my little netbook. I really can't justify spending 50%+ of the cost of the thing just to go SSD (as much as I would like a 120gb+ SSD in it). Current Win7+Office install is about 20GB with swap file and hibernation file too.

I have an Archos 605-160GB I can use for either video playback or just simply storage. I really need to dig that out again.