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
V for Vende...Value
This is the first time I’ve actually received a retail boxed Intel SSD. The packaging actually mimics that of Intel’s boxed CPUs:
Inside the retail package you’ll find a full upgrade kit. You get a 3.5” mounting plate, a mini CD with an installation guide on it, one of those My SSD Rocks! stickers and the drive itself.
The X25-V ships in the same aluminum housing as the X25-M G2. Cracking it open reveals a bare side of the PCB:
Flipping it over we see the 5 x 8GB 34nm IMFT flash modules, the G2 controller and 32MB of PC133 SDRAM. The controller and SDRAM size/speed are identical to the 80 and 160GB G2s we reviewed last year.
Intel's X25-V PCB
With only half the channels populated, sequential write speed is about half of the X25-M G2 (~40MB/s vs. ~80MB/s). Remember that Intel’s controller uses free space as spare area, so with potentially less free space on the drive the 40GB X25-V will undoubtedly perform much worse than the 80GB or 160GB X25-Ms.
Intel's X25-M G2 PCB
In practice, the X25-V should perform very much like last year’s 40GB Kingston V Series Boot Drive. The two are identical minus official support for TRIM in the X25-V’s firmware.
Kingston's 40GB V Series Boot Drive PCB
Intel’s storage drivers (Intel RST 9.6) with TRIM support are expected to be available any day now so you’ll no longer have to rely on Microsoft’s AHCI drivers for TRIM.
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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