Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] Generally, when we think of ways to increase our computer's performance, the first thing that naturally comes to mind is to upgrade the processor. Or, as a gamer, you may think to upgrade the graphics card first. But, regardless of your preferred order, increasing the system memory usually follows in a distant third. Beyond these options, though, what else can actually increase your computer's performance? We aren't talking about usability, features, aesthetics, or even cooling, as none of these inherently will increase the speed and responsiveness of the desktop that is near your foot or on your desk. There just isn't much else that jumps out as an obvious upgrade to increase actual system performance. An often overlooked or not considered option is the hard drive. For the better part of the past decade, enthusiasts that wanted the absolute best performance from their machines would turn to Western Digital's Raptor series of hard drives, which offer enterprise-level performance in a typical consumer hard drive. Shaving a few seconds off of level load times, the faster launching of applications, seeing faster file transfers and generally having a slightly zippier system were enough to justify the price premiums these drives demanded. The only constant with technology is change, and skipping forward to today, Solid State Drives have already begun the process of displacing Western Digital's exclusive Raptor offering as the only choice. The SSD market is only just beginning to mature, but already there are a myriad of fast SSDs that will trump any mechanical disk in performance, and in price. Before we go further to take a look at the latest SSD model from Kingston, we would like to make a request of our readers. As technology changes, we strive to stay in sync, but as with all new technology, it poses its own challenges to properly review. To help us deliver the content you are looking for, please let us know what you liked, didn't like, or wish to see in our future SSD content, by following the link to our forum discussion thread at the very end of the review! SSDs can offer the ultimate in storage performance, but they also offer the ultimate in sticker shock. Therefore, Kingston has decided to break the trend and deliver some of the best performance at the lowest price with its new SSDNow V Series 40GB drives. To be honest, in the era of 2TB hard drives, 40GB is obviously not very much space, so it is easy to see how Kingston was able to bring down the price. With only 40GB to work with (37.1GB useable), Kingston has chosen to position this drive as an entry-level upgrade to any mechanical hard drive-based system. The idea is the hard disk would be relegated to provide data storage, while optimally, the 40GB SSD would be just enough to house the operating system and programs. Data and programs that don't require a blazingly fast hard drive can simply be relegated to the hard disk drive. Before moving on, we need to clarify a few things about the SSDNow V series. Unfortunately, there are three very different kinds of drives that feature the "SSDNow V" moniker, and two of them are worth avoiding completely. The only SSDNow V series SSD guaranteed to use the Intel controller is the 40GB model. If that isn't confusing enough, there are still M-series drives in the market using Intel's first generation controllers and 50nm NAND flash under the SNM125 model. The second generation M-series controllers with 34nm flash have the SNM225 model name. If the marketing department's goal was to sell less attractive models by confusion, I'm sure it has worked, so we have assembled a quick reference table here to sort everything out. Series Model Class Controller Density (GBs) Price SSDNow E SNE125 Enterprise Intel (Gen 1) 32, 64 ~$380+ SSDNow M SNM125 Mainstream Intel (Gen 1) 80, 160 - SSDNow M SNM225 Mainstream Intel (Gen 2) 80, 160 ~$245+ SSDNow V+ SNV225 Value+ Samsung 128, 256 ~$350+ SSDNow V SNV125 Value JMicron 64, 128 ~$149+ SSDNow V SNV125 Value Intel 40 ~$130 The Kingston drive in this review is an interesting one. Unlike any other entry-level SSD currently available, the controller found in the Kingston SSDNow V 40GB is Intel's second generation SSD controller. More specifically, the same one found in Intel's own G2 SSDs! Knowing this, we can already expect reasonably good, completely stutter-free performance of this drive. Intel's advertised low 1.1 write amplification and wear leveling algorithm are amongst the best, ensuring that this SSD should last a respectable amount of time before the NAND memory begins to wear out. Just about all solid-state drives offer spare area that is used to maintain performance and wear leveling operations as the SSD fills up, and the 40GB SSDNow V Series is no different. So in effect, while the formatted capacity of the drive is only 37.1GB, that remaining 2.9GB does still exist and is used by the drive for this purpose. If any of these terms need more explanation or you would like to see a primer article on SSDs and how they function, please let us know! We'd love to 'gage' interest on that one. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Drive Internals; Test System & Methodology] The SSDNow's housing is aluminum, not plastic, which gives the unit a nice solid feel. As with most other SSDs, the form factor is the same 2.5" we've come to expect, requiring an adapter before it can be securely installed into a typical drive bay, which Kingston thoughtfully provides as part of their "desktop upgrade kit". "S2BD" drives include the upgrade kit, while "S2" models are just the bare drives. You can expect a ~$15 premium for these kits, which also includes Acronis' excellent drive backup and cloning software. Inside, there are five Intel-branded NAND flash chips. These are the older 8GB 50nm flash chips, and as the capacity suggests, exactly half of what could be installed, are installed. In effect, this drive is otherwise the same as Intel's 80GB first generation, except that it does feature the revised Intel controller from the second generation. This is important as it means we can expect Intel's typical levels of performance, albeit diminished given half of the default 10 flash channels are not present. It also means that if Intel had wanted, this drive could support TRIM later on, but as it appears, that's not going to happen, as it prefers to keep TRIM exclusive to its own 40GB SSDs. Test System & Methodology. At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a fully-detailed look at how we conduct our testing. If there is a bit of information that we've omitted, or you wish to offer thoughts or suggest changes, please feel free to shoot us an e-mail or post in our forums. The table below lists the hardware used in our current storage-testing machine, which remains unchanged throughout all of our testing, with the obvious exception of the storage device. Each drive used for the sake of comparison is also listed here. Component Techgage Hard Drive Test System Processor Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 - 2.4GHz Quad-Core Motherboard Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 Memory 4GB Corsair 800MHz CAS 4 Graphics Foxconn 8800 GTS 320MB Audio On-Board Audio Storage Intel X25-M G1 80GB Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB OCZ Summit 60GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB Power Supply PC Power & Cooling Quad Silencer 750W Cooling Arctic Freezer 7 Pro Et cetera Lite-on DVD-RW Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. Internet is disabled. No Virus Scanner or Firewall is installed. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less. Windows 7 Optimizations User Account Control (UAC) is disabled. Windows Defender, Firewall, Security Center, Search, and Updates are disabled. For consistency all power-saving options are disabled in the system BIOS, and for best SSD performance, AHCI is enabled. For Windows 7 the UAC control, windows update, and power saving features are also disabled. Our Windows 7 Desktop for SSD Testing To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows 7 from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing slightly inaccurate results. Disabling "Windows Search" turns off the OS' indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we'd like. Solid-State Drive Benchmarking. As we are using SSDs, we made sure all drives were in a dirtied state before we began testing. We recognize that TRIM support completely does away with the need to "dirty" a sold-state drive, but not all SSDs yet support this feature. Cloned test images were not used as these can result in non-aligned partitions, and the process of installing the OS will only further help dirty a SSD in addition to mirroring what the typical user can expect to receive from the drive. For obvious reasons, only the sole HDD in this review was defragmented prior to testing. For testing, we ran all tests five times, dropping the highest and lowest results to finally average the middle three. And who said that college statistics class wouldn't prove useful? If any anomalous results were seen, the test was run again. Given the complexities of modern computers, and especially today's operating systems, we feel this provides the most accurate results possible. As a result we at Techgage are going to stay current with the trends in technology and will be expanding our storage coverage to include solid-state drives, such as this...

Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB

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