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
Kingston’s 30GB SSDNow V Series Boot Drive
For $125, Kingston will sell you more of an upgrade kit than Intel will. The new 30GB V Series Boot Drive upgrade kit comes with 3.5” mounting brackets, cloning software, a molex to SATA power cable, a SATA data cable and the drive itself. If you just want the drive, Kingston will sell it to you for $110.
Inside the drive is a ridiculously small PCB screwed on so tight that I couldn’t even remove it for a look at the back.
The Toshiba T6UG1XBG controller on this drive is the same controller used in the latest Kingston SSDNow V+ Series drives. It supports TRIM but not NCQ, although as I found in my testing of the V+ drives the TRIM functionality is a bit odd.
Simply recognizing and accepting the TRIM command is one thing, what the drive’s controller and firmware choose to do with the data is another entirely. Some drives, like Intel’s X25-M and X25-V, appear to immediately flag all TRIMed LBAs for cleaning. This results in an immediate restoration to almost new performance when writing to those LBAs. Other drives, like those based on Toshiba’s T6UG1XBG controller, don’t show an immediate performance benefit when TRIMed. It’s unclear what the controller is doing with the TRIM information, but it doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to do anything with it.
With 32GB of actual MLC NAND on board, Kingston's drive is at a capacity deficit to the X25-V. A cleanly formatted drive only shows 28GB of free space in an OS and you can kiss more than half of that goodbye after you install your OS and a couple of applications. Kingston is hoping to make up for it by outperforming the X25-V. Let's get to it.
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AnnonymousCoward - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
410GB for apps, are you insane? The only way I can see that possible is if you store every warez app out there.Even my bloated work machine only uses 21.3GB.
davepermen - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
tell that to our work systems which have all sort of apps on + os (+office, sap, and many other things) and all have only a c:\ drive.it's perfectly doable. not for everyone (esp. not for gamers), but for more than people might imagine.
iwodo - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
While the idea of $125 for 80GB Intel SSD is nice, but if we dont get any performance improvement over current Gen then market might wait again.SATA 3?
ONFi 2.0 / 2.2?
Faster Random Read / Write?
I really hope we get new Intel SSD controller.
Japunie - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I'd like to see some benchmarks showing time saved. That's my main issue with a benchmark. Most show a higher number, but don't exactly show yo uhow much time your saving.Gaming benchmarks are self-explanatory but I would love to see more benchmarks showing the time difference as that to me is the ultimate reason to upgrade not just to have the fastest card, what have you.
semo - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
i'm for more real world testing. fot consumer sata drives stuff like startup times and virus scans. for eneterprise sas drives i want to see exchange, sql, etc performance numbers.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
You're absolutely correct. I've posted this 3 times and emailed Anand directly, but he continues to ignore it.http://tinyurl.com/yjcr5vm">http://tinyurl.com/yjcr5vm
http://tinyurl.com/ylflfao">http://tinyurl.com/ylflfao
There's no question that he's dead wrong to not address the single thing that matters with hard drives: time. Without it you can't see how significant the difference between drives are, the AnandTech Storage Bench doesn't mean squat since drives like the SandForce use compression, and hard drives have a long history of performing differently in benchmarks vs real life. For proof of those last two points, check out http://tinyurl.com/yamfwmg">http://tinyurl.com/yamfwmg where RAID0 bought 20-40% more IOPS but zero load time.
The only SSD time benchmarks I know of here are Pages 29 and 30 of the very first review http://tinyurl.com/yd73sf8">http://tinyurl.com/yd73sf8. Whuddayaknow, the Vertex boots up 1.2s slower than the X25-M, and loads WoW realms 1.4s slower. How about that, something tangible and meaningful to compare.
Belard - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Don't they usually?The kinds of numbers that are easy to understand:
- Win7 boot time (after POST is preferred, but whatever)
- Loading of a game, loading of a game while doing a background task.
- virus scan
- Loading and saving a large file in Photoshop or Excel.
- Win7 Shutdown time.
- Win7 Wake up (perhaps to quick).
My own experience with Win7 and the intel X25-M-G2
Win7 boot:
1m25s = Temp 160GB HD SATA (not a fast drive)
0m09s = Intel SSD (same computer)
0m35s = Another PC with a typical 500GB 7200RPM drive.
Belard - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
All the Sandforce drives are near the top, in general.But I'm not really seeing those drives out in the market? What are those prices like.
I have my experience with intels X25 G2 drives and they still seems to offer the best overall deal. Reliability, TRIM and price (now). The 80GB G2 is down to around $200... so spend an extra $80 and double the space to work with and vastly improve the performance over any of those drives.
A typical Win7 setup with NO user data is about 15GB, which mine is with various Adobe programs, 3 browsers, Office suite and dozens of add-ons. So a 30GB is barely enough for future usage. 40GB is fine, but the performance needs to be better IMHO in order for it to be an excellent desktop boot drive. In one of our desktops in an office, Win7 boots up about 8~10 seconds after POST. Everything is instant.
Scalptrash - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Less expensive, better specs. Hmmm...Ijiwaru - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
newegg lists the 30GB at 89.99 standalone and 114.99(84.99 after MIR) for the kit.buy has the kit at 78.95 after MIR
amazon has the kit at 111.11