Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

This review is a diamond in the rough as we were learning and rolling with the punches trying to get a RAID 0 array setup on a motherboard that featured SATA III 6Gbps. Our first big shock came when we found that the Marvell 88SE9123 controller that is used on the ASUS P7P55D-E Premium motherboard was not able to run a bootable hardware RAID array. The only thing thing that you can do to enable RAID on this SATA 6Gbps controller with two drives is to setup a standard windows software RAID configuration. This was the first time we used the disk management utility in Windows 7 to setup a striped array on a pair of dynamic disks. As you can tell, this method wasn’t the best to benchmark the drives since physical disk benchmarks were not able to run on the array. By doing this review though we did learn numerous things that we would not have known otherwise. In the end we were still able to get a look some performance numbers as four of the benchmarks we used turned in solid performance gains.

One of the negatives of the SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive is the fact that it doesn’t support TRIM functions in Windows 7. That really isn’t a big deal as we don’t know of any RAID drivers that do support TRIM. If you plan on running SSDs in RAID, you have already accepted that you want to give up TRIM support anyway. Other than that one negative, running a pair of Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drives in RAID 0 seemed like a solid setup. We found that the SATA 6Gbps controller isn’t RAID bootable, but for someone with an Intel ICH10R chipset, this setup would be ideal and fun to play around with. The next time we try to play with a RAID setup we’ll stick to the ICH10R or just spend the extra money and pick up a dedicated hardware RAID controller.

Legit Bottom Line: Being able to hit 370MB/s read speeds in the ATTO benchmark pretty much sums up our experience with the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drives in RAID!