Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSD Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The idea of having one drive as a boot drive and another drive for storage is nothing new. Kingston is the first company to bring to market an SSD for this task, though, and we must say that it is an interesting solution. With the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive available for as low as $84.99 after rebates it really might be one of the most cost-effective ways to improve any desktops boot, shutdown and application load times. It’s not every day a low-cost upgrade solution comes to market that makes such a big performance improvement, so we can see how this SSD will breathe new life into existing desktop computers and workstations in homes and offices around the world. Kingston informed us that the $85 is for just the the standalone drive, and it’s for a limited time when the drive launches. Kingston said the length of the discount has yet to set, so if you really want this drive we wouldn’t wait too long after it launches on November 9th!

The drive’s performance was nothing short of amazing as we were seeing sequential read speeds over 230MB/s in popular benchmarks like HDTach. The drive is rated for a sequential read speed of up to 170MB/s, so this was a nice surprise. The Achilles heel of this product would have to be its write speeds. The drive comes rated at up to 40MB/s for the sequential write speed and that is nothing earth shattering and to be honest, most hard drives can beat that. The 4K random write speeds on the other hand were the best that we have ever seen, so the write performance of the drive is either great or mediocre depending on how you look at it.

The one feature on this drive that is missing for the time period is TRIM support. For those of you that don’t know, the Trim attribute of the Windows 7 ATA Data Set Management Command, often referred to as TRIM, synchs the operating systems view of deleted files with those that are deleted, but not erased on the drive. TRIM tells the SSD which data blocks are no longer in use. This helps stabilize the performance and health of the SSD over time and is a feature only found on Windows 7. If you don’t plan on using Windows 7 then this isn’t a missing feature at all. If you plan on running Windows 7, then TRIM will be a key feature to help keep the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive running at a continued high performance level. As we mentioned previously in the article, Kingston said that this feature is planned for down the road, so we can only take their word for that. Intel’s TRIM supporting firmware just came out today, so hopefully Kingston’s won’t be too far behind.

That being said, the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive is ideal for those looking for a quick and easy way to boost system performance. If the performance numbers alone haven’t sold you, keep in mind that SSDs have no moving parts, offer greater energy efficiency and are more durable than traditional HDDs. If you are planning on upgrading to Windows 7 in the near future the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive should be considered to go along with the new operating system. If you think about it, you can make your current hard drive the storage drive and use this as the primary boot drive. Not a bad deal and for $84.99 after rebates. This is a great SSD to get your feet wet with. The Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive might just be the catalyst needed to bring SSDs to the mainstream!

Before you run off searching for drives here is an updated cheat-sheet to help you understand what is inside the various Kingston SSDs:

• Kingston SSDNow E Series
  – (Intel Gen 1 Controller, 50nm Intel SLC NAND, 16MB Cache)
• Kingston SSDNow M Series
  – (Intel Gen 1 Controller, 50nm Intel MLC NAND, 16MB Cache)
• Kingston SSDNow V+ Series
  – (Samsung Controller, Samsung MLC NAND, 128MB Cache)
• Kingston SSDNow V Series
  – (JMicron Controller, Toshiba MLC NAND, No Cache)
• Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive
  – (Intel Gen 2 Controller, 34nm Intel MLC NAND, 32 Cache)

Legit Bottom Line: The Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive has an inexpensive price tag, but don’t let that fool you. It is an Intel 34nm Gen 2 SSD in disguise!