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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Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
The SSD Toolbox won't work on RAID volumes unfortunately.Take care,
Anand
buzznut - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
Thanks Anand for clarifying the raid and SSD toolbox issues. I can see now that adding a second 40 GB drive will not be a good idea and I should save for a larger capacity.I am very interested in knowing when Intel gets trim working for raid! Good to know I can count on Anandtech for the latest SSD news. Thanks again, Scott
pkoi - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
The difference between 30gb and 40gb is HUGE,,, I would need 50 to swap my bloated win7inighthawki - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I have a 30GB partition for Win7 and still have 8GB left, and that's after some pretty careless space management. I don't understand how yours can be so bloated. You're not counting things like program files, are you? You're aware that the users and program files folders aren't part of your windows installation, right?gerstena - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
"I have a 30GB partition for Win7 and still have 8GB left, and that's after some pretty careless space management."Unfortunately things like volume shadow services and the source files of windows updates quickly eat up the space. A lot of users won't know about these things.
The only thing I have found drives under 60 GB useful for are speeding up database operations and development.
hoohoo - Tuesday, March 23, 2010 - link
I have 8 GB for OpenSuSE 11.2 and still have 3 GB free.I dunno about Windows bloat - yours or the other guy's!
davepermen - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I need one. it would be enough for 3 windows 7.no clue how bloated yours is :)
loimlo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Dear AnandYour nice review of Kingston indeed encouraged me to purchase Kingston 64GB SSD for my win7 system, but your TRIM comment just kept my purchase impulse at bay. Would you mind clarifying the TRIM situation in the future? If nothing wrong with TRIM implementation on Kingston SSD, I'll buy bigger brother, 64GB SSD, for my system immediately!
Thanks