Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB: Intel X25-X

Value

The Kingston V Series and the Intel X25-X it’s based upon are interesting offerings to the SSD marketplace, and at less than £90 offer a tempting entry point into the wonderful world of solid state for much cheaper than previous offerings. Or at least, that’d what we initially thought until looking a little closer and found that the £/GB of this drive isn’t really too far from the competition.

A 64GB Crucial M225 (effectively a re-badged OCZ Vertex at a lower price) can be found for £150 with a formatted capacity of 59.6GB or £2.51/GB and a 128GB M225 is similarly priced at £300, again £2.51/GB. In comparison the Kingston V Series 40GB (37.26 formatted) comes in at £2.30/GB and is a considerably slower in a number of circumstances, most notably sequential write speeds in which it really is shockingly slow.

Of course, these problems get corrected somewhat when you add a second drive in RAID 0, an action Kingston is looking to promote by selling the 40GB V Series in RAID ready dual drive kits. However, while RAID does boost performance, it can be a pain to maintain and the threat of drive failure, despite being greatly reduced in SSDs, is nevertheless doubled by the use of two linked drives.


Even with RAID though, for a comparable £/GB you’re getting notably less performance than you’d get from the (admittedly more expensive) competition. The only place that the V Series really excels is, like all Intel based drives, random write speeds, but in real everyday use this is heavily outstripped by the miserly sequential write speeds.

Most real world random write tasks involve tiny amounts of information (writing log files or chat logs for example) and the 10MB/s speeds of most modern SSDs is more than enough. Of course, in a server based environment where hundreds of users are accessing a drive at once random write becomes much more critical but in a consumer performance drive it’s just not as relevant as a towering sequential write speed, which the V Series just doesn’t deliver.

Single drive performance is poor in comparison to the competition and the sequential write speed really isn’t up to scratch under any circumstances and hold the drive back. In RAID 0 this issue is greatly lessened, but even then the V Series 40GB still can’t overhaul the Spinpoint F3 for sequential write speeds, and you won’t see any significant improvement in real world scenarios like boot times or game loads.

Final Thoughts

As a single performance drive for use in a desktop system it’s a miss then, although it’ll undoubtedly be a lot more tempting for laptop or netbook users. £80 is a reasonable ask and on these mobile platforms where sequential write performance isn’t so important, and the V Series 40GB does still deliver superbly improved boot times and improved overall responsiveness in comparison to hard disk drives, especially slower 2.5in models. For the high performance PC market though there are, as we’ve said already, better options.

It’s a shame really that this drive is such a disappointment, as a cut price SSD for the masses is exactly what the market needs right now – a drive to get those who’ve been standing on the side lines to take the plunge, swallow the high £/GB of NAND and jump aboard the good ship SSD. Sadly, that time hasn’t come (yet), and this isn’t the drive that’s going to do it.

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Score Guide