Customer Reviews

Kingston SSDNow V Series 64 GB SATA 3GB/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive with Desktop Upgrade Kit Bundle SNV125-S2BD/64GB

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I grabbed this SSD to replace a boring 160G 5400rpm drive that came with my Netbook (Lenovo S10) get to enjoy instant access to everything. there is no spin-up time, the concept of drive sleep no longer exists. Boot time is like 70-80% faster. The system is now completely silent, and I don't feel like I have to coddle it, because the hard drive is spinning. It adds a new freedom to computers. I didn't get the laptop bundle (Kingston SSDNow V-Series SATA2 128 GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive with Notebook Upgrade Kit Bundle SNV125-S2BN/128GB) because it was out of stock at the time, however that is a better deal that this, because it gives you an enclosure for the old drive. Since I already had a 2.5" enclosure, this one was OK for me.

Overall, the SSD is a great improvement over my old hard drive, The company behind the product is also good, and I highly recommend it.


Pros:
Faster that a hard drive because there is no spin-up or seek time
Uses less power (Better battery life on the notebook)
Far more durable -- (you don't have to be a careful as you must be when dealing with a spinning hard drive)

Cons:
Far more expensive than a comparable hard drive.
MLC based SSD's can wear out with constant writing. The manufacturers have special algorithms to minimize the wear of a single memory cells, so I figured that if Kingston can warrant it for 3 years, its no problem for me.

I purchased this drive to compliment my install of Windows 7 Ultimate. I was looking to spend as little as possible, while getting a product from a trusted brand. Being 100MB/s read and 80MB/s write, it is probably one of the slowest SSDs. There is no documentation in the packaging for this drive, so you should have some basic understanding of the inside of your computer before trying to install the drive. You will probably notice a difference in the start-up of your operating system, but do not expect instant on changes with this product. There is no mini-usb port, so portability is really not an option. It is built for read speed, so that means installing your OS on this is a good use. However, if your trying to record video or do anything that needs to write new data constantly and on the fly, I would probably stick to magnetic drives. Overall, the drive was easy to install and the start-up time improvement was noticeable. However, if your not in a rush, I would recommend holding out to see if the 200+MB/s read drives drop well below the two hundred dollar mark (assuming size is 64GB) in the next 6-12mos.

He doesn't own it and he's wrong. Is it the fastest drive? No. It's the least expensive. It is about 1/2 the speed of the high end SSDs, for less than 1/2 the price. It is faster than 7200rpm drives for things like access and small reads/writes, which is what you notice most when using an OS. A fast 7200rpm can be faster on large file write/reads, but not enough for anyone to claim that in a notebook, this drive is beaten by these drives.

Putting this SSD in a Toshiba netbook was an amazing transformation. It also booted my MacBook Pro, as an external USB HD, in about 1/2 the time it takes to boot from the internal 7200rpm drive, which is connected directly by SATA. That's real world. The other reviewer has no experience, but because he can "read specs" he thinks he knows everything. Ignore him. :)

I have an old Pentium 4 (3.0GHz) single processor PC running Windows XP [2GB's memory] that would take exactly 5 minutes to boot and open Microsoft Word. After migrating to the Kingston SSDNow V64GB solid state drive, my PC now boots and opens Word in 1 minute and 28 seconds.

While I did not purchase this from Amazon, I figured I'd write a blurb about this SSD. It is great for the price - this is the least expensive 128gb SSD available (I paid $200 @ MicroCenter). More than a traditional 2.5" drive for sure, but comes with a USB HDD External Enclosure, USB to Micro-USB Cable and Acronis Software to clone your old drive. All in all a good bundle (the desktop bundle includes a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter instead of the USB enclosure.

Installation was a snap. Put my old 250gb HDD into the USB enclosure, put the Acronis CD in, connected the USB enclosure and hit the power button. Viola, my laptop (ACER AS-6530) saw the drive, saw it was new and started the Acronis software. Here is where the confusion sets in - nowhere does it say to format the SSD before cloning. After I figured that one out the rest was simple. My other complaint is that when cloning the drive the software cloned everything instead of letting me pick what partions(s) I wanted to clone. Only about 10gb, but since I upgraded to Win7 from OEM Vista I really don't wnat or need the recovery partion that contains Vista in it.

Bottom line - you get what you pay for. If you want the lastest technology in your computer then here is the entry level unit. Want the lastest, greatest and fastest, then look elsewhere, but be prepared to fork out twice the price. The Kingston SSDNow! V-series is faster, more energy efficient, cooler running and shock-resistant than a traditional platter based drive. Of course if you have an inexpensive laptop like me then after replacing the 1gb SODIMM with a 2gb piece and adding the SSD then you have close to 2/3 the acquisition cost of the laptop. That simple.

5 of 5 stars for the Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB SATA2 2.5-Inch SSD Desktop Kit. To summarize, this is a very fast "disk" (Solid State Drive). My plan was to replace the "C" drive (system disk only, all of my data is on "D") on my Windows Vista desktop system. In addition to having the system and swap files on this SSD, I also planned to have temporary video rendering files stored on this drive. Before installing this SSD, I took several days to carefully work thru everything on my C drive to shrink down the contents as much as possible to more easily fit into the 128G. As this system is a couple of years old, it has accumulated alot of junk on C much of which can't be removed. During the actual installation of the SSD, I used the included utility CD to do a drive copy from my old C to the new SSD; it worked perfectly and easily. A quick recable to make the SSD my boot disk and wow-it rebooted quickly. I have been using this SSD for a couple of months with no problems or issues.

My Christmas project was to do a Windows 7 upgrade to this system. The upgrade completed successfully with the benefit of the removal of alot of hidden junk from Vista, my C drive shrunk about 30G! An interesting note, Windows 7 knows about SSDs such that ReadyBoost is disabled as the whole C drive is already SSD (Vista was kinda dumb and happily used a ReadyBoost cache to cache from SSD).

I am happy to recommend this as a good upgrade!

The main advantages of SSD's are faster boot time, increase battery life and faster loading of programs. Coming out from Hibernate and Sleep is FAST! Running programs depends on the CPU's speed. I also liked that an external case came with this unit and didn't have to buy a separate one.

UPDATE: One of my Kingston SSD has crashed that I purchased back in December. All of the sudden the 'no OS was found' warning came up. I placed the drive to an external case and it only showed 4gb and couldn't be formatted. The good thing is that when I called Kingston they said they are going to replace it with the newer model (SNV425). Am waiting for the replacement. Nice support from Kingston.

Easy to install and excellent performance. Since installing this SSD in my EEE Netbook, application performance has at least doubled with very little lag time when opening MS Office and Web browsing. Battery life has also improved slightly. Highly recommend this product to anyone who is looking for a cost affective way to improve netbook performance.

I got this to take to afghanistan, and I used it for a year with no problems. I wasn't taxing it to the max, but it did a good job for what it was doing.

This is awesome. Boot times are half or less that what they were before. I put the operating system, MS Office and Firefox on the SSD and set them to autostart. It's still less than half the time it was before without the autostart programs. There was no problem with installation. No different than a hard drive. Looking forward to the sizes getting larger and the prices going down.