Kingston won't provide firmware updates for recent SSDs
Posted on 16th Mar 2010 at 10:21 by Richard Swinburne with 10 comments
Apparently those of us who own a Kingston 40GB X25-V Value SSD are not going to receive a TRIM update after all. That's despite the fact that the X25-V uses the same 34nm NAND and controller as the 80GB and 160GB G2 SSDs, which have got TRIM support..
It's not Intel's failing though - who have released a TRIM firmware for its X25-V, and the situation is highly surprisingly given Kingston's "great relationship" with Intel.
Since the drive has already reached End of Life only a few short months after it was launched, that means Kingston has effectively dropped support for it as well. Great customer service there, Kingston.
There is a pretty elaborate hack for adding in TRIM support admittedly, which is graciously explained by a few enterprising and very clever individuals at Overclock.net.
For future features on all its drives, not just the X25-V, we've been told that Intel (and by extension Kingston) has no plan to develop any sort of manual garbage collection for those who don't use Windows 7 either. TRIM is exclusive to Win7, so the many, many people still with XP (and the few with Vista, I suppose) will not benefit.
That's just another reason to go buy a cheaper Indilinx drive who have had a years worth of firmware updates, and given its post-sales commitment, evidently not one branded Kingston.
It's not Intel's failing though - who have released a TRIM firmware for its X25-V, and the situation is highly surprisingly given Kingston's "great relationship" with Intel.
Since the drive has already reached End of Life only a few short months after it was launched, that means Kingston has effectively dropped support for it as well. Great customer service there, Kingston.
There is a pretty elaborate hack for adding in TRIM support admittedly, which is graciously explained by a few enterprising and very clever individuals at Overclock.net.
For future features on all its drives, not just the X25-V, we've been told that Intel (and by extension Kingston) has no plan to develop any sort of manual garbage collection for those who don't use Windows 7 either. TRIM is exclusive to Win7, so the many, many people still with XP (and the few with Vista, I suppose) will not benefit.
That's just another reason to go buy a cheaper Indilinx drive who have had a years worth of firmware updates, and given its post-sales commitment, evidently not one branded Kingston.
10 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyI'd like to see an SSD that actually needs SATA 6gbps.
Just something to consider before diving headfirst into SSD world.
That's true. Intel dropped the G1 as fast as it could. It's partly why recommend Indilinx: consistent, reliable support.
if intel had done what they should of done and made an firmware update for there G1 SSDs would of been an good buy, the Kingston hack is really not that hard
Samsung are bit Quite when it comes to SSDs, at least they added TRIM support to there second gen SSDs as that would of got corsair really messed up and a lot more unhappy users then there are all ready (still need to fix the Write latency)
Toshiba i think do make there own SSDs now (not JMicron or was it the New *Fixed* 612 that now has cache thats now used?)