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
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