Kingston SSDNow V series solid state drive

 

I recently attended a webinar on the Kingston SSDNow V series solid state drive.  As an incentive to watch the webinar they were giving away a five 64GB Notebook Upgrade kits as a door prize. I maybe have won two things in my entire life so I was really surprized when they called my name.  I have been waiting like a kid waiting for Christmas for this to come in the mail (it's a geek thing) and finally it arrived.

...

The webinar cited using these drives as a replacement for regular hard drives in law enforcement vehicles due to their ruggedness and in servers where speed and reliability is an issue.  But I had other visions in my head.... the vision of speeding up my desktop.  I currently have a 350GB root drive in my machine with NFS mounts to directories on other machines with a total filesystem capacity of almost 1TB.  I really need to give some thought to file structure on my machine... my home directory is almost 60GB.  I really need to do some cleanup.....

My machine is no slouch, but it could use a speed boost.  The video below is only one of many videos available that shows how fast these drives are.






The upgrade kit includes the SSD drive, a stand-alone case for the drive makeing it a USB drive, and a CD which includes Hard Drive Cloning Software.  I slipped the drive into the stand-alone case to check it out and it makes for a sweet USB drive.

The features and specifications of the Kingston SSDNow V Series drive is shown below.

Features:

  • Performance – enhances productivity; makes users more efficient
  • Innovative – 2.5" form factor; uses NAND flash memory components.
  • Silent – Runs silent and cool with no moving mechanical parts
  • Reliable – less likely to fail than a standard hard drive
  • Shock Resistant – No moving mechanical parts so the SSD handles rougher conditions.
  • Supports S.M.A.R.T. – Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology tells the user when a drive is about to fail
  • Guaranteed – 3 year legendary Kingston warranty, 24/7 tech support

Specification

  • Capacity* – 40GB, 64GB, 128GB
  • Storage Temperatures – -40°C to 85°C
  • Operating temperatures – 0°C to 70°C
  • Vibration Operating – 2.17G (7–800Hz)
  • Vibration Non-Operation – 20G (20–2000Hz)

  • Sequential Speed** –

      64GB, 128GB – Up to 100MB/sec. read; 70MB/sec. write
      40GB – Up to 170MB/sec. read; 40MB/sec. write

  • PCMARK® Vantage Advanced HDD Suite Score+ –

      40GB – 13,883
      64GB – 10,436
      128GB – 10,580
  • Power Specs –128GB  Active: 2.5W (TYP)  Sleep: 0.45W (TYP)
    64GB   Active: 2.0W (TYP)  Sleep: 0.45W (TYP)
    40GB   Active: 0.15W (TYP)  Sleep: 0.06W (TYP)
  • Life expectancy – 1 million hours mean time before failure

Ok, so my install was a bit of a kluge.... it is a 2 1/2" drive and the mounting brackets didn't come with this version.  So I just plugged it in and layed it up in an empty bay.  It will be fine.  Installing Linux Mint also went fine.  Well,  I installed Linux Mint 7 as when I tried the LM 8 live CD I ended up with a black screen.... seems to be a problem with the video driver and I didn't feel like messing with it right now.  I deleted the extra files off my 320GB drive leaving a little over 200GB free.

So, what is the end result?  Well the boot time before the upgrade was somewhere around 30 seconds from first glimpse of GRUB to the login screen.  Now it is around 10 seconds.  It could be my imagination, but everything seems a little faster.  At a list price of $208 for the stand-alone 64GB drive it is a little expensive but for applications where ruggedness, reliability, and/or speed is needed this drive seems to work really well.  I'm happy with it.