Solid state drives (SDD’s) have come a long way for being an experiment as a non mechanical driver for storage of digital data in the early 1980’s. And now with the refinement of the silicone dies and also the storage procedures makes it possible to have a ultra fast drive with the same characteristics as the humble RAM memory module. So the intro of Intel with their own SSD drive being the X25’s being one of the fastest you can find in a NAND flash procedure, but with the pace of the other company like the corsair and more noticeably the OCZ with their better process to keep the drive into better stability in storage, more noticeably in the cut and paste of files. Well this trend can be a help of the introduction of the SSD market to the mainstream users and to day to day lives of computer users in saving photos without the fear of mechanical failures or fast latencies in gaming and the lot.
Well, Kingston hit the place also in the SDD market, In the world of performance storage, users will soon be polarised into the haves and the have-nots; whether you have an SSD or not. The huge impact they can make on a performance PC, especially when it comes to boot times, installing patches and the general responsiveness of a system really can’t be understated.
However, Kingston’s new addition to its V Series line of SSDs looks to at least lower the entry requirements for the world of SSDs with an affordable price tag of just ~$125 (including mounting kit). While the drive’s capacity is very limited at just 40GB, could this be the drive we’ve been waiting for?Claimed specifications of 170MB/s and 40MB/s write (no that’s not a typo) show that not all the SSD performance has survived the drop to a sub $213 price tag though, and with a formatted capacity of just 37.26GB space we’re also worried about space too – a clean Windows 7 install with a hibernation and page file will be close to filling this drive.
However, Kingston has foreseen our concerns with the drive’s performance and capacity and will be selling it in dual drive, RAID 0 ready kits, which should theoretically double the drive’s sequential performance, at the cost of higher chance of failure and reliance on a decent RAID controller. As well as the drive, Kingston also includes a basic mounting kit for the drive, along with a SATA cable, a Molex to SATA power connector and a driver CD. Completing the package is a solid three year warranty along with 24/7 tech support should you run into any problems. As with all storage devices though, this warranty does not cover the data stored on your drive so always make a backup of vital files. Even though an SSD has no moving parts to fail, drive failure and data corruptions, although phenomenally rare, can still occur.
As a single performance drive for use in a desktop system it’s a miss then, although it’ll undoubtedly be a lot more tempting for laptop or netbook users. $125 is a reasonable ask and on these mobile platforms where sequential write performance isn’t so important, and the V Series 40GB does still deliver superbly improved boot times and improved overall responsiveness in comparison to hard disk drives, especially slower 2.5in models. For the high performance PC market though there are, as we’ve said already, better options.