Intel's X25-V & Kingston's 30GB SSDNow V Series: Battle of the $125 SSDs
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 19, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
A Comparison of Spare Area
All SSDs set aside some percentage of their flash for recycling and bad block allocation. The portion set aside isn't user addressable and is often referred to as Spare Area. Most consumer MLC drives have about 7% of their total flash capacity reserved for use as spare area. Intel's X25-V is no different. The table below shows the available space vs. total NAND capacity on the drive for both the Intel and Kingston drives:
| Drive | Formatted Capacity | NAND Flash | Spare Area % |
| Intel X25-V | 37.27GB | 40.0GB | 6.8% |
| Kingston SSDNow V Series Boot Drive | 27.95GB | 32.0GB | 12.65% |
Intel's X25-V actually has the same percentage of spare area as the X25-M. It's the SSDNow V Series that is a bit perplexing. Formatted capacity for the "30GB" drive is 27.95GB. Given that NAND devices, like all memory, are made in powers of 2 there has to be 32GB of NAND on the drive. Either the Toshiba controller is using over 12% of the total NAND capacity as spare area, or there's only 30GB of usable flash on the drive. The latter could be true if the NAND devices had some existing bad blocks on them.
Either way, the X25-V basically delivers an extra 10GB at the same price point as the 30GB Kingston SSDNow V Series Boot Drive.
The Test
| CPU | Intel Core i7 965 running at 3.2GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset: | Intel X58 + Marvell SATA 6Gbps PCIe |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel IMSM 8.9 |
| Memory: | Qimonda DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 285 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 64-bit |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
78 Comments
View All Comments
Taft12 - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
A few hundredths of a second - $1000 well spent!!!semo - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
wow am i seeing <2mb/s sequential write speed on those drives? it must be an error i'm pretty sure that SD cards can do better than thatsamspqr - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
there's a 4 on the other side of the axis: it's 41mb/sQChronoD - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
That is annoying...Hey Anand (or TWIMC)
Isn't there a way for your pretty graph program to move the text to right of the bar if there isn't enough room for the label to fit? It's really annoying when you can't read half of the results because the super long product names are compressing the graph...
icrf - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Agreed, it is pretty annoying. What is used to generate these graphs? A third party tool or something in house? What language/what tool?Taft12 - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
I remember one of the other regular contributers mentioning that getting the graphs to look nice is not trivial, and I've had the same experience trying to accomplish the same.Of course, if the bar is so small you can't see the number, it doesn't really matter what the number is, the result is dismal.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
It's an automated system that unfortunately doesn't handle that case very well. We're launching the new site in a few weeks and we'll be updating the graph styles as well, so I'm going to try to get that fix in there :)Take care,
Anand
fless - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
You can change the location of those labels in swiff chart pro. Right click on the number then select single label. You're too lazy.samspqr - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
hisome time ago, 3dprofessor found that swapping a standard HDD for a WD velociraptor increased rendering performance by a sizeable 10%
http://www.3dprofessor.org/Reviews%20Folder%20Page...">http://www.3dprofessor.org/Reviews%20Folder%20Page...
in fact, I'm pretty sure in the core2 times they got much bigger improvements on a dual-socket board, but I can't find that review anymore
you also do rendering tests on your CPU reviews
could you test rendering performance of some standard 7200 drive, vs the velociraptor, vs a low-end SSD, vs a high end SSD? with your new gulftown, perhaps?
thanks
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
Anand stopped benchmarking SSDs in ways that pertain to real life long ago. http://tinyurl.com/ylflfao">http://tinyurl.com/ylflfao