Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB SSD Review

Interior Impressions

Before we continue: Please remember that opening any SSD will effectively void your warranty.


When we first peered inside the SSDNow 40GB, we were surprised to see absolutely no chips what so ever. As you can see in the above photo the green PCB has the pin outs for 10 NAND chips, but none were populated. When we flipped this board over we finally got to see what we were looking for. In grand total there are 5 MLC NAND chips, one RAM chip and one Intel controller chip. We really wish that Kingston had gone for smaller capacity chips as the Intel controller is set up for 10 channels and thus having only 5 chips means it can only operate in 5 channel mode. This is the reason for the abysmally low write speeds of this drive and it could have been easily avoided by going with cheaper and smaller NAND chips.


The I/O controller chip is of course none other than the Intel second generation System On a Chip PC29AS21BA0 controller. While details are slim, this controller is a 10 channel beast which unfortunately is not going to get to work at full capacity in this particular drive. If reports are correct this second generation chip is based on the same design as the previous generation, except it is now Halogen free (and thus is more environmentally friendly) along with a few small tweaks like reduced latency thrown in for good measure. This is not a bad thing per say as the first iteration was very impressive, but we were hoping Intel would have taken the time to really improve on the first generation’s write abilities.


Interestingly, the Ram which graces this board is made by Micron. To be more specific this tiny 32MB, 54-pin TSOP II lead free chip made by Micron is labeled as MT48LC16M16A2-75 IT. Where it is the “-75” variation of that model, this particular 3.3v SDRAM chip is rated to run at a maximum speed of 133MHz at CL3 or 100MHz with CL2 timing. Furthermore since it is the “IT” variation (and thus Industrial Temperature) it is rated for an operating range of -40°C to +85°C. In many ways this chip is inferior to that used by the competition as it is quarter the size as what Samsung uses for their drives’ onboard cache (128MB) and is only half the size of the ones found on Indilinx drives (64MB). Not only is it smaller than the competition it runs 20% slower as well as (133mhz vs. 166mhz).

Further compounding things is the fact that this memory is not only smaller and slower but is also based on a more energy intensive design than that of the competition. Usually we see 1.8V chips used in solid state drives yet this little slow poke uses the much older 3.3V standard. We are honestly puzzled by this move as while it is twice as large as the cache found on the first generation X25-M, it is slower (33mhz to be precise). Why take the time to increase its size if you are going to take away its speed? Heck, if you are going to take the time to source out a new chip why not go and drop in a 64MB (or 128MB or 256MB), 1.8V 166mhz one like everyone else does? Why hobble a kick ass controller with old and slow ram?


As expected, this SSD uses Intel MLC NAND, and while we were hoping to see lower density chips (and thus more of them), once we saw the 5 ships used on this board we instantly knew what these were going to be: 32nm chips with a density of 64gigaBIT (8GB). To be precise this chips are Intel 29F64G08CAMD1 Multi Layer Cell chips and are the EXACT same ones found in Intel branded X25-M generation 2 drives, just with half as many used.