Kingston V Series RAID0 vs Samsung PB22-J

F1aw1ess

F1aw1ess

F1aw1ess

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Hi,

I have read everything available to try and make an informed decision about what to buy but I still cannot decide and hope you guys could point me in the right direction.

As the title says I am currently looking at 2 x Kingston V-Series 64gb to run in RAID0 or the Samsung PB22-J 128gb.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I need 128gb approx to store OS Win7 x64 Ultimate and my games which are about 60gb on their own, If any other drive would be better please suggest it.

My absolute max budget is £250.00

Cheers lads :)
 
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Samsung every time in that comparison.

The Kingston V 64gb use the JMicron controller - which is slower and has been known to suffer from stutters.

You should also look at the Crucial M225 128gb, which I would prefer. The Intel 160gb is probably too far over your budget, otherwise I'd also suggest that as an option.

One other option is to run 3x40gb Kingston V drives, these are around £70 each though you'd have to shop around. These drives use the Intel controller and are hard to beat in terms of price and performance.
 
thanks for the reply, id heard the JMicron controller has got rid of its stuttering problems now and although they are about half the speed of the decent drive I thought have them in RAID0 should even out the performance.

considering the Kingstons V 64gb are about £100 each that makes it almost £50 cheaper than the Samsung and £80 cheaper than the Crucial you mention.

Do all these drives have the TRIM function I keep hearing about?

Yes the 160gb Intel is a bit out of my range but I could trim down my installed games as I only play a few of them and go for the 80gb Intel, Would you suggest the Intel over all the others if you had to choose?
 
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Yes I have read conflicting reports on the later JMicron drives. Personally I'd avoid.

If you're not put off by a RAID solution, then the Kingston V 40gb drives using the Intel controller may be ideal. Don't overlook these - but don't confuse them with the other V series drives either :D

[edit]

Only the Crucial supports TRIM at the moment. Samsung's may in the future, and I've no idea about the Kingston V 64gb's. The Kingston 40gbs I think will support TRIM. But any drives in RAID will not be supported as Intel need to develop their RAID drivers to allow the OS to pass the TRIM command to the drive.
 
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I have a couple of Raptors in RAID0 at the moment so RAID doesnt put me off but with what you say about the TRIM not working via the RAID driver I may bite the bullet and get the more expensive drive to avoid any potential problems.

I dont know whether I can warrant the price of the 128gb drives, its a lot of money for a hard drive.

I'm thinking of shaving down my installed games and going for the silver Intel drive, I see in the reviews that they have just released a firmware update so it now supports TRIM.
 
TRIM is useful, but it shouldn't be a deal breaker.

You don't hear a lot from those with older drives that will never support TRIM. Plus most of use is going to be reads, so how long will it take to dirty the cells and degrade performance - probably quite some time.

Even when it gets bad, you're still getting good performance, and you can relatively quickly break the RAID0, clean the drive and then restore from an image.

Ultimately I expect we will see Intel drivers supporting TRIM, and the Kingston's already have the Intel 2HA firmware.

I guess what I'm saying is go with your head, as to what is best, but I wouldn't be significantly influenced by whether a drive has TRIM or not.
 
Cheers for all your help, one last question. I see the reads are faster on the Intel's and as mentioned above most usage will be reads but the write speeds are quite a lot slower than the M225.

Will this be noticable in normal usage?

I saw on another post here small writes are very quick its the larger writes that are slower?

Does this mean writes on things like installations of games (eg 1024mb files) will be slow but general usage will be as quick as the M225.

Cheers again, its much appreciated.
 
The reads and writes specified are for the sequentials. These are large single files so very misleading in day to day use, because you'll be reading and writing smaller files.

The Intel's are extremely strong in the smaller writes. But overall in day to day use you won't really notice any difference between either drives for average use. They all "feel" roughly the same.

Installations of games is a tricky one, because you will almost always be installing from a slower medium, DVD drive or network, which will never trouble your SSD.

Take a read of this http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=8 and the final page too. It will give you a good idea of relative performance based on how you plan to use your drive(s).
 
I've decided to go Intel and TRIM (no pun intended) down my games or run a couple of my less used ones off the 500gb SATA data drive.

Thank you very much for your time and your patience :D

Ordering off OC now :)
 
I know you said it shouldnt be a deal breaker but I want a system with least amount of maintenance required and running those in RAID means TRIM wont work.

I've also read somewhere that some people are having trouble RAIDing SSD's, I have an older mobo now with a P35 chipset so I really dont want the potential hassle.
 
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Well I think TRIM is being over sold.

BTW are you planning to keep the Raptor's in RAID0 and run all these drives off the ICHxR on your board? If so for TRIM to work you'll need to use the default MS drivers shipped with Windows 7. The Intel ones don't work yet, so you'll lose a bit of performance there.

I'm running some of the Kingston's and some of the Crucial's in RAID on ICHxR and no issues. In fact no different to setting up a traditional HD RAID.
 
No Wiper doesn't work on Intel or Intel based drives like the Kingston - it's only for Indilinx drives like the Crucial and OCZ Vertex/Agility. But even then it doesn't work in RAID.
 
Well as you know I went for the 80gb Intel X25-M G2 and have it sat next to me all wrapped up ready for xmas :mad: Thanks for the quick del OC

I'm not going to be running the raptors in RAID anymore no, I'm going to pop them on eBay.

I've got a quick question about how to tranfer the OS from my RAID Raptors to the SSD though, It's Windows 7 x64 Ultimate.

I use Norton Ghost and always keep a fairly new image of the system should I need it, but I have been reading over these forums and some have said the partition gets offset (maybe wrong wording) with Acronis True Image, Impacting performance.

Am I likely to get any problems with Ghost?

I usually just chuck the recovery CD in the drive and boot from it, then choose my data drive where the image is stored and overwrite the C: drive. Once I've pulled the raptors I was going to format the new SSD as C: and transfer the image to it.

Am I likely to run into any problems?

Thanks again for your help
 
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