The SSD is a new "it" trend in the computing market; you have heard us talk about them from a few different angles including giving you information about how key players plan to standardize the SSD products.
While all that is great it does not really let you know what you should do if and when you make the move to an SSD and stuff it in your desktop or laptop. Kingston, a company with a history of making great memory products, has a nice solution for you. Recently, the company joined forces with Intel and began selling rebranded X-25M drives under the brand of SSDNow. The idea was to put a handy little SSD upgrade kit to make the move to SSD easier for you. We here at BSN* have the good fortune to try one of these kits out. So let’s dive in and see just how simple the Kingston SSDNow upgrade kits makes the move from HDD to SSD in an ASUS G2S-X1 notebook running the Windows 7 Release Candidate, and also see if it is worth it.
Packaging:
The test sample that we received is not what the retail packaging would look like so we are not able to comment accurately on how well this will attract your attention or protect the product. We can talk about what Kingston has included for you in this kit.
I was rather impressed with the contents; while many manufacturers will include basic cloning software with retail drives I have yet to see one include an external USB enclosure to allow for easier duplication.
Kingston has done this and more, they also threw in a set of 2.5-Inch to 3.5-Inch adapter rails, SATA cable and a Molex to SATA power converter. For software they include a bootable version of Arconis True Image HD.
The SSD thrown in is the 80GB flavor of the SSDNow M [Intel X25-M 80G] it has a great speed advantage in many applications over a traditional HDD but is on the small side for many applications.
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