Go To Latest Video ReviewsKingston Unveils New Budget SSD Line Comments
| Author | Edward Chester |
| Published | 26th Oct 2009 |
Comments for Kingston Unveils New Budget SSD Line
xenos said on 26th October 2009
Andrew Violet said on 26th October 2009
Any news of bigger drives
Ed said on 26th October 2009
@xenos: I was going to say there's no way to but I suppose you might be able to use one of these drive blanking tools that fills the drive with 0's. It's not something I've looked into though. Apart from that, there's no way to recover performance. Once the drive's been filled you should reach a plateau of performance beyond which it shouldn't drop but also won't recover from. Of course this is still only a problem for write operations.
@Andrew: No larger drives in the forseeable.
pspr33 said on 26th October 2009
£70 for a decently speedy boot drive? Not bad. I would have preferred a 64gb or so drive to use as a boot drive but I'm assuming this will be the start of lower prices for SSD drives.
Mathew White said on 26th October 2009
There are two things that make me almost cream my knickers.. the first is the thought of opening my bedroom door to find Ben Cohen laying there in the buff - and the other is the thought of the 1 or 2TB SSD for prices equivalent to todays HDD prices... I'm starting to feel like the first fantasy may come true sooner than the latter. Hopefully, we'll see some real progress in this sector within a few years and we can all ditch the mechanical Hard Drives. But I suppose we should all be grateful that we're no longer suffering the disappointment of a floppy disk. I know I'm not.
Malderon said on 26th October 2009
I dont really think its a bargain. in £perGB terms its not much cheaper than a Gen2 Intel X25-M which isnt a budget drive and is therefore much faster. Yes its cheap, but only because its low capacity - in relative terms, its not that great.
Xiphias said on 26th October 2009
And 37GB isn't enough for a boot drive anyway, my system-only partition is pushing 30GB, and that's with all the temporary files and cache moved away and all my programs installed on another partition.
Ryan said on 26th October 2009
@Malderon:
Exactly! To me, cheap means "sure, why not?" rather than "whoa! lets do some research before shelling out £70!".
The key is to get below the line (to me, sub-£40/£50 is the "buy a compelling product without too much thought" threshold...)
Ed said on 27th October 2009
@Malderon: The Intel 80GB drive is on offer at scan.co.uk for £184, which gives it a cost per gigabyte of £2.30. This drive has a cost per gigabyte of £1.75. I'd say that's quite a difference. Besides which, you can't buy a smaller version of the Intel drive so its a moot argument.
@Xiphias: Huh? I just installed Windows 7 again last night and it took up 12GB. Sounds like plenty of room to me.
@Ryan: I take your point, £70 isn't an impulse buy, but that isn't the definition of cheap or budget, though. £70 is the sort of level that I'd hazard many people would be willing to stretch to, without too much thought or effort, for a quick performance boost.
AJ said on 27th October 2009
I'll be looking for the review. Within the next few weeks I will be trashing my Windows 7 RC build and completely reinstalling from the full retail version, I'd be interested to know before I do that just how much difference to boot times and general speed having Windows 7 on an SSD would make.
xenos said on 28th October 2009
Did some reading, as long as you can get Windows on the hard disk (IE. you use FAT32 or find some way of enabling HFS in Windows, or somehow manage to get OS X to run on an NTFS partition, I've seen it done) then you can use a drive cleaning tool from Windows. Apparently zeroing the drive would work too.
Still not sure how long it would take for the performance to drop off. Bit-Tech will have an article soon apparently.
I'm not sure how the low write speed is going to affect it in the real world, and if it will still always feel faster than a hard drive, can't go that wrong for £70 though.
Malderon said on 28th October 2009
@Ed : The price has gone up due to stock constraints since I made that comment. I ordered mine last Friday from scan @ £165, which as current retail pricing for the Kingston looks to be more like £80 than £70 puts it bang on the money.
Secondly there is not currently an intel 40GB drive, but there will be. This is a clone of what Intel call the X25-X (as opoosed to X25-M) which will be hitting very soon. Given that Intel will generally be quicker on the firmware etc with its own drives rather than with rebrands, I would suggest waiting for that.
Sources:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Intel-SSD-Value-X25-X-Storage,8877.html
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/27/kingston-ssd-now-v-series-40gb-intel-x25-x/1
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40Mbyte write speeds still piss all over most laptop drives.
In a mid range laptop (especially one which doesn't take advantage of TRIM, ala Snow Leopard and the new entry level MacBook) this could be interesting.
Though, I really have no idea how long it would take before performance took a nose dive; and how your meant to recover it without TRIM support? Do you simply backup the disk and format each year? Anybody?