Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSD (Intel G2)

Got mine this morning. Here's a couple of benchmarks.

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Nice numbers, Mik :)

Thank you all for egging me on - I have my pair now :) As regards windows installs, I daresay it would be wise to switch the swapfile and Users folders onto a hard drive, since in the absence of trim, all those tiny writes to temporary internet files and the like are going to mash the ssd up pretty good - would we generally agree?
 
In principal, yes, but in reality It's probably not worth the effort. lack of TRIM doesn't slow the drives down that much.
 
Not to mention, there aren't lots of tiny writes to the page file. There's lots of tiny reads, making it very suited to SSD, and fewer small writes of about 1MB.
 
Have the page file on an SSD can really boost performance too. I'm guessing that putting it on a RAM drive would be even better!
 
Is this better than the 64Gb version with 80Mb read/write speeds? I had a 64Gb drive and tbh i found it stuttered a bit.
 
This is basically half of an intel drive, so yes. Kingston seem to name their drives on price brackets rather than lineage (afaik this drive doesn't share much in common with the other V series drives...)
 
MeatLoaf said:
Is this better than the 64Gb version with 80Mb read/write speeds? I had a 64Gb drive and tbh i found it stuttered a bit.
Click to expand...

No this one has an Intel controller, the one you bought IIRC was a JMicron. I thought you said it didn't have the stutters on the one you had?

As Josh says, the Kingston range names are a bit misleading, or confusing. Check you're buying the right model number :)
 
There is an interesting feature of the Intel X25-M disk. If with a unused disk (or use HDDErase 3.3 to secure erase the disk), you create a partition smaller than the space available, the firmware will use the unpartitioned space in its wear levelling, which increases the expected lifespan of the disk. The sweet spot is a partition around the 62GB mark which gives a threefold increase in endurance ( http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2009/sf/aep/IDF_2009_MEMS003/f.htm ).

So a 80GB X25-M partitioned to only use 60GB would give

50% capacity over the Kingston
100% increase in write speeds over the Kingston
200% increase in expected lifespan over the Kingston

and cost around about twice the price of the Kingston.

(which isn't to say you shouldn't get the Kingston, but should feature in your considerations)

Matthew

P.S. as the Kingston uses Intel firmware, it may be the case that you can achieve a similar result partitioning the Kingston to say 30GB. However, it is also possible this feature is disabled in the Kingston's firmware - I've not seen any information either way.
 
mdovey said:
There is an interesting feature of the Intel X25-M disk. If with a unused disk (or use HDDErase 3.3 to secure erase the disk), you create a partition smaller than the space available, the firmware will use the unpartitioned space in its wear levelling, which increases the expected lifespan of the disk. The sweet spot is a partition around the 62GB mark which gives a threefold increase in endurance ( http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2009/sf/aep/IDF_2009_MEMS003/f.htm ).

So a 80GB X25-M partitioned to only use 60GB would give

50% capacity over the Kingston
100% increase in write speeds over the Kingston
200% increase in expected lifespan over the Kingston

and cost around about twice the price of the Kingston.

(which isn't to say you shouldn't get the Kingston, but should feature in your considerations)

Matthew

P.S. as the Kingston uses Intel firmware, it may be the case that you can achieve a similar result partitioning the Kingston to say 30GB. However, it is also possible this feature is disabled in the Kingston's firmware - I've not seen any information either way.
Click to expand...

Ok I listened to most of this, and it's geared up solely around enterprise useage.

I think the key metric I picked up on was endurance for an Intel x25m 160gb has a random write lifetime of 15tb per 4k cell - this was their conservative estimate. What I couldn't equate this to is average life expectancy for a drive in an enthusiast/home situation. But what does this all mean to the average home/enthusiast user? The Intel spec sheets give 1.2million hours mean time between failure with a 3 year warranty. This is line with traditional HDs.

I can see the point of this for enterprise situations where they will be regularly written to for e.g. databases and it will extend the lifetime of these drives in a critical situation - and would likely fail within the 3 years or 1.2million hours because the random writes were extremely excessive. My understanding is that the way all SSDs work are that once a NAND cell dies, the firmware marks it as bad - ultimately once the spare area is used, the drive size reduces. It's akin to marking bad blocks on a traditional HD.

This increasing the spare area, just seems like selling snakeoil really - i.e. I'm reserving more of my drive for cells that will eventually fail..take this to an extreme position then if you leave the drive in the box or only ever write a couple of gb to it, then it will last even longer still - surely an enterprise having to do this with a "client drive" to get what they consider a reasonable life expectancy should be looking at using SLC based drives instead.

I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I don't think this article applies to enthusiasts using these drives. Unless they are either running heavy use databases at home or want them to last significantly longer than the warranty period/MTBF figures (remember they were conservative figures). Personally I feel the drives will be old hat by that time, so I won't be worried if they are worn out by the time the warranty expires.

Yes the Kingston is based on the Intel G2 Controller - I will have to check at some point whether it holds the same SMART flags as it's bigger brother - but even at full 80gb capacity it is more than double the price of the Kingston. So I would expect two Kingston 40gb in RAID0 to perform favourably against a single 80gb Intel for less cash - though I'd need to see some tests proving it.

Definitely pros and cons to each, but I think they're geared towards different users/scenarios.

I'd be interested in hearing your views on my interpretation of the podcast you linked to too. :)
 
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The specifications quote an estimated life of 5 years for the X25-M if the average write is 20GB per day. Intel presentations however claim that is a conservative estimate and the real value is 5 years if the average write is 100GB a day.

Both are estimates, however, and depend on how well the wear levelling actually works.

You'll find people worried about the effect of writes and how quickly the disk will wear out - hence people suggesting disabling page files, indexing etc. on SSDs. Some of this worry is unfounded as, hopefully the time it takes to wear out will be long enough that the disk will be obsolete and/or replaced. This feature of Intel SSDs gives another mechanism for extending the life of the disk for those worried about such things.

That said, you are probably better off watching the appropriate SMART settings (there is one which monitors total writes to the disk for instance) to see what the expected life of the SSD is (if you are writing below 20GB per day, then you are on target for 5 years life minimum) and only if usage is high consider making use of this feature.

In my case (like a few others), I'm using the SSD in a Media Centre as the boot disk (with mechanical disks for storing recordings). The SSD does not get particulalrly high writes but does get written to by guide updates, thumbnail caching, hibernate files etc. However, the hardware I have today, assuming it is still working (and drivers are available etc.) should still be able to do Media Center tasks (recieve TV, play music and videos etc.) in 5 years, 10 years, perhaps even longer, and giving up some of the GBs I'm not using on the SSD to ensure the boot disk will last that long seems a good trade off to me.

Others running a Media Centre, however, might be perfectly happy to replace the boot disk after 5 years (and in any case, these are only estimates and a 40gb Kingston may last much longer than that).

Overall, it really depends on your usage - the Kingston is not a good drive if you will be doing a lot of writing (the Intel will be faster, and allow for increased wear levelling), but if you write usage is low (or "normal"), the Kingston would be more cost effective.

Matthew
 
I disagree the Kingston is a good drive on writes. Just not the best. It is still better than most of the Indilinx and Samsung based drives.

I still can't subscribe to the opinion that limiting your capacity now to add 5, 10, 15 or 20 years to the life of the drive is sensible. Even with your example with a media center I'd be surprised if you're hitting a few gb a day, let alone 20gb so without doing anything to the capacity you'd be well over the 5 year useage mark, yet you've lost the benefit of that space now. Sure if you're not going to use it then fine, but why not buy a smaller drive in the first place, such as the Kingston and save yourself money.

Maybe it just's me, but if a drive lasts me 5 or 10 years that will be nice, but it's not my expectation and I'd prefer to use the space I've paid a premium for now, and pick up another drive which will hopefully be cheaper and bigger to replace it in a few years time.
 
It's half the max.speed of the Intel 80gb+ as it has half the channels (a bit of a discussion on the previous page). But it's consistent across the range at around 40mb across the whole range. So whilst slower at sequential than the Indilinx, it's much better at the 4kb's.

But this is it...only enterprises will be really hammering these things on heavy writes, that's where the increase spare area comes in - because they will need a return on investment and expect hardware to last a specific period - in a large enterprise probably much, much longer than a home user and then 10 years wouldn't surprise me - together with much heavier use. Unless you're running a massive 24/7 database then it's not really an issue, but I'm coming at this from an enthusiast angle not an enterprise. Clearly the Kingston would not be very attractive in an enterprise situation.
 
I'm not too bothered about the life expectancy tbh, it has a 3 year warranty and in 3 years I expect they will be 3 times faster, 1TB and sub £200.
 
Was just going to say the same thing most will upgrade there ssd's in a year or so anyway so matters not.
 
How good would one of these really be compared to a VR for a main desktop machine?

I only want a single os drive but the writes really put me off.
 
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