Page 2: SSDNow V Series, Use
SSDNow V Series
The initial crop of SSDs that hit the market way back were riddled with problems caused by a bad controller. The issue was made worse since everyone was using the same controller on all of their own drives! It was well worth sitting out of the market for some time until the dust settled and the issues were worked out, so Kingston's wait should prove to be a plus for consumers purchasing this drive.
This drive is rated for 100MB/sec reading and 80MB/writing. This is probably a limitation of the controller to save some cost and to stabilize the performance. The drive uses NAND flash memory and is a MLC based drive. Kits for the V Series come in 64GB and 128GB variants and the subject of this review is the 128GB one. While Kingston doesn't provide metrics for access time, it should be much faster than 1ms based on the performance of other SSDs. One area were SSDs really shine is random reads. Combining a fast access time with a very good reading throughput means that those stutters upon using your computer will be minimized. When purchasing a SSD, don't just think of raw performance as the only metric. It is how you use your computer daily this is the most important factor. SSDs really shine when put through daily use.
The V Series supports SMART monitoring and comes with a three year warranty. The MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) is listed as 1 million hours, but there is no data on how much writes per day (or hour) this is doing. With a three year warranty, Kingston is saying that the drive should be able to last AT LEAST three years and probably much longer. Warranties are all about how well designed and reliable the product is. If the product is good in those two areas, companies will provide longer warranties; and in the age of single year warranties, three years is good. Five would be better, but since this is a new product, it is understandable that the length of time is a factor.
Cracking the drive open and seeing the internals is a good part of any review of this nature. Kingston selected to use Toshiba chips and a Toshiba controller in this SSD. There are a total of 16 memory chips indicating that each chip is 8GB. Flash is really getting into the high density market.
The controller is a Toshiba TC58NCF602GAT. Even though this says Toshiba on it, it is actually a JMicron JMF602 controller. Fortunately, Kingston has worked with these companies to work out the bugs for months.
Use
While the majority of reviews focus on the hard benchmarks to find out the value of a product, there is more to value than just that. This drive has been in use for the past two months, and it is a dream to use over a magnetic drive. The lack of stuttering along with the very speedy random read times makes this drive very useful as the primary storage device. It is 128GB which is large enough for most people, and it is fairly easy to supplement the drive with an additional magnetic based storage drive for the high capacity needs for some users. Kingston has done a good job bringing their first in-house designed SSD to market.
The initial crop of SSDs that hit the market way back were riddled with problems caused by a bad controller. The issue was made worse since everyone was using the same controller on all of their own drives! It was well worth sitting out of the market for some time until the dust settled and the issues were worked out, so Kingston's wait should prove to be a plus for consumers purchasing this drive.
This drive is rated for 100MB/sec reading and 80MB/writing. This is probably a limitation of the controller to save some cost and to stabilize the performance. The drive uses NAND flash memory and is a MLC based drive. Kits for the V Series come in 64GB and 128GB variants and the subject of this review is the 128GB one. While Kingston doesn't provide metrics for access time, it should be much faster than 1ms based on the performance of other SSDs. One area were SSDs really shine is random reads. Combining a fast access time with a very good reading throughput means that those stutters upon using your computer will be minimized. When purchasing a SSD, don't just think of raw performance as the only metric. It is how you use your computer daily this is the most important factor. SSDs really shine when put through daily use.
The V Series supports SMART monitoring and comes with a three year warranty. The MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) is listed as 1 million hours, but there is no data on how much writes per day (or hour) this is doing. With a three year warranty, Kingston is saying that the drive should be able to last AT LEAST three years and probably much longer. Warranties are all about how well designed and reliable the product is. If the product is good in those two areas, companies will provide longer warranties; and in the age of single year warranties, three years is good. Five would be better, but since this is a new product, it is understandable that the length of time is a factor.
Cracking the drive open and seeing the internals is a good part of any review of this nature. Kingston selected to use Toshiba chips and a Toshiba controller in this SSD. There are a total of 16 memory chips indicating that each chip is 8GB. Flash is really getting into the high density market.
The controller is a Toshiba TC58NCF602GAT. Even though this says Toshiba on it, it is actually a JMicron JMF602 controller. Fortunately, Kingston has worked with these companies to work out the bugs for months.
Use
While the majority of reviews focus on the hard benchmarks to find out the value of a product, there is more to value than just that. This drive has been in use for the past two months, and it is a dream to use over a magnetic drive. The lack of stuttering along with the very speedy random read times makes this drive very useful as the primary storage device. It is 128GB which is large enough for most people, and it is fairly easy to supplement the drive with an additional magnetic based storage drive for the high capacity needs for some users. Kingston has done a good job bringing their first in-house designed SSD to market.