Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB SSD Review

Conclusion

Reviewing a drive such as the Kingston SSDNow V-Series is a bit of a tough proposition because of the conflicts we all have within us when it comes to budget-oriented products. The enthusiast in our hearts cries out again and again for blistering, eyeball-bursting performance and it is sometimes hard to remember that there are plenty of people who want to make the jump into the SSD pool but just don’t have the funds necessary for bleeding edge performance. That’s where drives like this SSDNow come into things: they offer solid performance, palatable pricing and can be considered the perfect gateway drug into the world of high end storage solutions. Kingston however has made this “Desktop Upgrade Version” drive all the more appealing with a long list of accessories and some great performance to boot.

We can honestly say that when we heard about this drive our first thought was that it was going to be the new king of budget solid state drives and after testing it we can say that out hunch was correct. While there are many better, faster, bigger and more powerful options out there, the 40GB SSDNow is so darn inexpensive and yet offers so much performance for the asking price that you can almost consider it a guilt free impulse buy. The simple fact of the matter is, this drive is not priced, designed or marketed as a direct competitor to flagship models like the Vertex, X25M gen 2 or the various Samsung solid state drives, yet in many tests it does admirably well. In many cases it really does give flagship model solid state drives costing much, much more a real run for their money. As a boot device it posts times that easily beat any hard disk drive out there and is competitive against any solid state drive in its price range.

To us the only "real" weakness this drive has is its limited size; however, as it is such an inexpensive way to get into solid state drives it is a very tempting option. If you pair it up with a massive hard disk drive for storage (say a 1TB drive) it will make one amazing bang for your buck setup. With Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, and a bunch of programs installed like Office 2007 Ultimate, Adobe Photoshop CS3 and an assortment of others we find that 30GB is about as much room as you absolutely need. This makes the 37.25GiB (useable formatted space) perfect, as it still leaves you with 20% free space for the wear leveling algorithms to work with.

Does the SSDNow kick ass in all categories? No, it doesn’t due to being severely handicapped and it does show in some tests. However you need to have a reference point to compare it against to notice any real lack of performance and we don’t really think you will see much of a difference between it and higher end drives when you are using it for everyday tasks.

On the flip side of that coin, if you are an enthusiast who is used to the performance of a 128GB Falcon, Torqx or Vertex (with their good small, medium and sequential write speeds) you WILL see a difference. This is because sequential write speed does count for quite a bit when it comes to overall system performance and those devices are simply better options IF money is not a deciding factor. With that being said, if this is your first solid state drive and you are moving over from hard drives you will notice an improvement in system responsiveness.

While this drive cannot compete against flagship Indilinx or Samsung or even Intel solid state drives, it was never meant to. This is an amazingly low priced solid state with more than adequate perofmance. So much so that you can get three SSDNows for the same coin as one X25-M gen-2 . Heck for just a few dollars more you can get TWO of these little peppy drives for the same as ONE 60GB OCZ Vertex. If that doesn’t sound like the deal of the century…..solid state drives are not in your immediate future.

For its good real world performance abilities combined with "good enough" capacity all combined with a downright frugal price point we think that this drive is going to be the way many first time consumers will enter the wonderful world of solid state drives. We can go on and on about the merits of the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB but the best way to sum it all up is to say that it is a Dam Good Value.


Pros:
- Price
- Good read speeds
- Good real world performance
- Excellent small (4k) write performance
- Best in class accessories (desktop upgrade kit only)
- Uses the Intel X25-M generation 2 controller

Cons:
- Size
- Only 32mb of slow onboard cache
- Controller is only working in 5 channel mode
- Abysmally low sequential file write speed
- Lacking Trim support (right now)