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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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