If we ask ourselves how much money would we invest in Solid State Drive technology and what would we expect from it, the answers are usually on the opposite sides of the spectrum. From one side, we want them as affordable as possible and from the other, faster that a rocket.
Enter the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive. Nate over at Legit Reviews just reviewed this SSD drive that promises to bring the best from both worlds. If we forget quite stupidly, pardon - confusing naming convention [performance-wise, this drive has nothing to do with original V series, but is more of a low capacity version of V+], we get a 40GB SSD drive for 85 bucks after rebates.
While that kind of money will get you a terabyte hard drive, buying a 1TB drive won't give you the speed of an SSD. Kingston's idea is to put this drive as your C:\, system drive and install the operative system right on it. According to Kingston, this should result in a much faster load times, and more importantly - an overall improvement in your everyday computing experience.
In order to achieve just that, the 40GB "Boot Drive" is based on the second generation of Intel's SSD technology made using their 34nm process. The speeds Nate achieved were much faster than declared ones, and it is no wonder: while the original V series comes with mediocre read speeds [100MB/s] and write speeds [80MB/s], this drive is declared at "V+ Series"-like 170MB/s, with a pathetic 40MB of write speed. Mind you, unlike the actual V+ series, these drives use Intel controllers as opposed to the Samsung ones found on the V+ series and the Jmicron on the V series.
But, as we already stated, this is a 2nd gen Intel SSD, achieving 231.5 MB/s in read tests and 256.2 MB/s in burst mode, one of the fastest results Intel-based SATA 2.0 motherboard can handle. Unfortunately, the drive only has five MLC chips, resulting in a write speed slower than most 7200rpm drives on the market. Then again, this is only the first sub-$100 drive [with decent performance] on the market - head over to Legit Reviews and read the review. We are getting some ideas what could we do with two of them in RAID0 mode... maxing out the bandwidth available by Intel's Southbridge never sounded more promising...
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