Customer Reviews

Kingston SSDNow V Series 128 GB SATA 3 GB/s 2.5- Inch Solid State Drive with Notebook Upgrade Kit Bundle SNV425-S2BN/128GB

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

A few days ago, I bought the Kingston SSDNow 128 GB SSD (second generation series 425) from the biggest computer retail chain in North America. The device is working okay on my notebook computer, but there are three caveats to be aware of.

Firstly, the included Acronis True Image software refused to clone the Windows Vista SP2 system installed on my notebook computer, reporting that there are errors in my (factory-installed) partition structure. I had to use the free edition of Macrium Reflect to get the job done, by creating a Macrium Reflect image of my hard disk, and then restoring the image onto the Kingston SSD inserted into an external USB case.

Secondly, according to the "Error Scan" test of the well-known utility, HD Tune Pro 4.50, my Kingston SSD has four bad sectors. The error report generated four lines, one of which is "Error at 61681 MB (LBA 105843611)"; the other three lines are the same but with different numbers. I do not understand what this really means, specifically whether these bad sectors have been mapped out. My gut feeling is that these have not been mapped out (in which case, this would be bad news!) because the CHKDSK utility does not report any bad sectors. Furthermore, the "Speed Map" feature of HD Tune Pro reports that the same bad sectors have abnormally slow access time. So far I have not noticed any system instability.

Thirdly and most surprisingly, my Kingston SSD actually consumes more peak electrical power than the notebook hard disk that it replaced. (As an electrical engineer, I have an interest in power requirements.) Yes, it is true that SSD technology is more power-friendly than hard disk technology, but that is so only at the level of the storage medium. When we are talking about the whole device INCLUDING the drive controller, that is not necessarily true. Moreover, we need to ask what kind of hard disk (desktop or notebook) we are stacking up against the SSD, because some 2.5 inch hard disks consume very little power.

Three observations indicate that the Kingston SSD may be consuming more peak electrical power (but less idle power) than did the notebook hard disk it replaced:

Firstly, according to the same utility, HD Tune Pro 4.50, my SSD is running consistently at 40 to 46 degrees Celsius after starting cold from 28 degrees. On the other hand, my hard disk (the one replaced by the SSD) was previously running between 34 to 38 degrees. This is the Hitachi HTS543232L9A900, a very typical 2.5 inch 5400 rpm 320 gb SATA device.

Secondly, the Kingston SSD's power specification, as printed on the device's label, is 900 mA at 5VDC, which is actually higher than the specification printed on the label of the Hitachi hard disk (700 mA at 5VDC). It is possible that the SSD has higher peak current but lower idle current than the hard disk, in which case the SSD will still have the overall advantage.

Thirdly, when I put the SSD inside an external USB mini-case, and then plug the whole unit into a USB port, sometimes the USB port cannot power the SSD device. Between my two notebook computers, I have seven USB ports, and only four of them can power the SSD externally. (You can overcome this problem by double-cabling, but this will occupy two USB ports.) By contrast, all seven USB ports can power the Hitachi hard disk.

After switching to SSD, I do notice an increase in speed:

It now takes 58 seconds to cold-boot Windows Vista SP2, compared to 80 seconds previously. It now takes 6 seconds to fire up Photoshop CS4 in a first-run cold start, compared to 13 seconds previously. It now takes 10 seconds to get the folder properties of a folder with 140,000 files and subfolders, compared to about 105 seconds previously.

HD Tune Pro 4.50 reports the following benchmarks for the SSD (with the corresponding Hitachi hard disk values shown in parentheses for comparison):

- Minimum read transfer rate = 172.9 Mbytes/sec (versus 12.8)
- Maximum read transfer rate = 182.4 Mbytes/sec (versus 65.8)
- Average read transfer rate = 178.6 Mbytes/sec (versus 49.1)
- Access time = 0.3 msec (versus 18.4)
- Burst rate = 94.2 Mbytes/sec (versus 92.1)
- CPU usage during the benchmark = 9.3% (versus 13.8)
- Temperature = 45 degrees Celsius (versus 34)

Sorry, I do not have the write benchmarks because HD Tune Pro refuses to run them unless I "remove all partitions" (whatever that means). Also, the above benchmarks may give you the false impression that the computer is now running several times faster than before. Most of the time, the computer feels only slightly faster. But there are situations in which the speed increase is very obvious, like when I fire up a program, or when Windows wakes up from sleep, or when copying files within the SSD, or when there is a lot of random disk access (e.g. when comparing two folders).

This Kingston SSD has a "primary hard disk" index of 5.9 in the Windows Vista Experience Index. Note that 5.9 is the highest possible score for Windows Vista (unlike Windows 7, where the highest possible score is 7.9).

I give 4.5 stars to the Kingston SSD.

UPDATE (October 15, 2010):
I wrote my review of this Kingston SSD four months ago. This week I bought another one for my new Acer Aspire One notebook computer. This time, I bought the Kingston desktop upgrade kit, whereas last time I bought the notebook upgrade kit. I can confirm that the SSD itself as well as the included Acronis True Image CD are identical between the two kits; the only difference is in the mounting hardware (hard disk enclosure versus mounting bars + power cable). This time around, even though I didn't need any mounting hardware, I bought the complete SDD desktop upgrade kit only because it happened to be cheaper than a standalone SSD, for a couple of days at least.

This time, the Acronis True Image cloning software worked flawlessly. For my Acer Aspire One notebook, my Windows Experience Index for the primary hard disk increased from 5.7 to 6.7 after switching to SSD. The bootup time for the same notebook (using 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium) went down from 104 seconds to 49 seconds, as measured to the time when the sidebar widgets appear.

I recently purchased the Kingston SSDNow 128gb solid state drive with the laptop upgrade kit and to say the least the difference in my older Sony laptop running Vista is jaw-dropping. I recently had to decide whether to upgrade my current laptop (with a 5200 rpm HDD) or spend even more money and purchase an entirely new computer - and I'm very happy that I decided to upgrade with a new SSD. Not only was it much cheaper than purchasing an entirely new computer (which would also leave me with trying to get rid of my current one), but there are several other positives as well:

- Boot up time from a cold start is now around 25 seconds to a usable desktop and 45 seconds to surfing the internet (the additional delay is waiting to connect to my home network);
- All other programs now load in seconds or faster;
- Surfing the internet seems faster, and download times are noticeably less than half;
- My laptop runs cooler (the cooling fan runs less) and is so quiet I have to double-check to see if things are still happening. This translates into less power consumption and slightly more battery life;
- Virus and Spyware scans now run in less than three minutes as compared to 30 minutes with the old drive;
- Kingston provided a case for the old HDD hard drive that I removed from the computer, which now gives me a free back-up drive;
- System stability seems just fine and with a SSD there is little or no time wasted in defragging the drive.

The Acronis disc imaging software that is included with the kit is very simple to use, although I would highly recommend printing out and reading the instructions on the disc first before doing anything. It cloned my original drive (two partitions, about 90gb total) in about 30 minutes.

The only drawback would be that the HDD enclosure that Kingston provides is inexpensive plastic - but it still works well for what it is and I'm not complaining because it would have been an unnecessary delay and expense if I had to go out and buy one myself. Other than losing just over 32gb by having to go from my original 160gb HDD to the SSD's 128gb then I would have nothing to complain about.

Overall, this is a very complete kit that doesn't require much computer savvy to achieve excellent results. This is an excellent value for your money and I can highly recommend it to others who want to breathe new life into an older laptop without breaking the bank in the process. Even though it is inevitable that the prices of SSD's will drop over time, you will be amazed by the results for the money.

Jon651

ADDENDUM - It's been almost two months with my new Kingston 128gB SSD installed in my older Sony laptop running Vista and the performance has remained wonderful. There has been no degradation of boot-up speed and other improvements I originally mentioned, and this laptop has now become my preferred computer for doing almost everything that doesn't require a full-size screen and keyboard. In fact, I recently added an extended battery and I can get right at 5 hours of use from it (providing I'm not using the DVD drive or burning a disc).

I'm still convinced that this Solid State Drive was the best thing I could have done to bring my older laptop back to life. If you are using Vista, I believe that you will be totally impressed by the improvement in your system's performance. With all of the bad press Vista has gotten over the years, this SSD has shown me just how it was supposed to perform - Jon651

ADDENDUM - It has now been over a year since I first installed the Kingston SSD into my laptop and I can report nothing but positive things. I use this laptop frequently (but not daily), and system stability has been excellent with only one crash in this time that I can recall (and I can't even directly attribute that to the SSD). Boot times and program access times continue to remain fast and nothing has slowed down where it would be noticably different than after I first installed it. It has develped an annoying but not fatal 10-15 second "freeze" right after the desktop comes up, but my desktop also running Vista with a standard HDD has the same habit so I don't attribute this issue to the disc.

During this past year I have seen faster, larger, and cheaper SSD's (which was inevitable due to the nature of technology) but since I made my purchase this drive has actually saved me quite a lot of money by extending the useful life of my laptop much longer than it would have been if I kept everything the same. If I hadn't made this purchase, this machine would be long gone by now - Jon651

The Kingston ssdNow has more than met my expectations. As a graphic designer I routinely need to open, manipulate, and save files that are in the gigabyte realm. The fast 200MB/sec read and 160MB/sec write speeds of this drive have allowed me to maximize the throughput of my MacBook Pro's SATA's interface. Thus I'm able to spend more time editing and less time waiting; saving me both time and money.

Installation was non-trivial using the included 2.5" External Drive enclosure and a downloaded copy of SuperDuper to clone the Mac OS 10.5 file system. The complete process took under two hours, with the majority of that time involved in the actual cloning.

After cloning was complete, my laptop enjoyed a 23 second boot-time versus a previous 48 seconds (over 200% FASTER!) I was also able to open up Photoshop CS5 with a 500MB image is 18 seconds in comparison to over a minute before. I'm also enjoying a 7 second Windows XP bootup time within a virtual machine on my computer.

Some other benefits that I've noticed as time goes on are as follows:

* Longer Battery Life
* Less Heat
* Silent Drive
* Nearly Instantaneous wake up time from sleep mode

I'm completely sold on this drive and fully recommend it.

Seems like a fairly good drive - not to be confused with the previous generation Kingston SNV125, which most online reviews of the Kingston V series used. That drive apparently used a vasly inferior controller and suffered significant performance degradation over time.

Even without attempting to do any sort of alignment and using the enclosed Acronis software to clone my existing Windows 7, I seem to get very decent performance - read rates of over 200MB/sec, Write times 80-100MB/sec. XP seems to also perform well - apparently the controller implements self-heal/garabage colllection, but its not clear if this would work well on OSX/Linux. Boot times are noticeably faster, even on a relatively fresh windows install

When using Truecrypt Full Disk Encryption under XP, performance drops significantly - read rates 120-150MB/sec, write rates of 40-60MB/sec. Still, much faster than a magnetic drive, and I suspect all SSD drives will show much slower performance in this usage.

It raised my windows 7 experience index hdd score from 5.9 to 6.7! Startup time was definitely reduced quite a bit. I was using a seagate 7200 rpm 250gb drive. This runs somewhat cooler and quieter. It also uses less power and improved my battery life a bit. These original V-series ssds are among the slower ssds on the market (they're being replaced by the faster V+ series). Still it is plenty fast for me and perfect for my laptop.

I won't go into detail (as other people already have), but the external enclosure + cloning software with this notebook bundle work great just as expected.

59.5GB formatted. Even with my complete Windows 7 installation, page file, all my programs, (including photoshop cs5, a full sized game, media players, firefox, etc.) and the full MSworks suite I am only using 25GBs! Make sure to disable scheduled defrag, hibernate and system restore. You should reduce the page file to ~250MB to limit excessive writes (you could also eliminate it completely if you have plenty of ram, though not recommended). I also configured firefox to use memory cache instead of disc cache. Windows 7 auto detected the SSD, enabled TRIM and disabled superfetch, prefetch and indexing. I believe this auto detect only works if the drive is running in AHCI mode which most modern sata controllers are (check BIOS settings to be sure).

I installed this drive as my primary OS drive in a new Asus gaming laptop. I did a clean install of Windows 7 Professional, which automatically sets the alignment properly for optimal performance. Everything went silky smooth with no issues at all. The 500 GB standard drive in the laptop is now my D: drive for data storage, and the location of the Windows swap file (don't put the swap file on the SSD!!)

Performance with this drive has been phenomenal. I can do a complete restart from a busy Windows 7 session in about 35 seconds. Not 35 seconds to boot from being turned off... that's 35 seconds from telling Windows to restart to being able to log into the account again!

The laptop runs very cool with this as the primary drive, and I am getting close to 200MB/s on the read throughput. And of course, it contributes to a very quiet laptop :-)

While there might be some eventual degradation due to whatever wear algorithm Kingston uses, it's still going strong after two weeks of installing and running all the software I had on my old laptop.

Unless something sudden happens to destroy my opinion of this product, I think it was a great investment and a terrific drive!

These bad boys are fast. If you are in the market for SSD's don't buy this model ... you're better off with the latest Kingston offering, the V+ series because it has automatic Garbage Collection feature and does not require TRIM support. I have an AMD system which currently lacks in TRIM support so I have to revert to MS drivers. Anyway this is a very good product and works well.

Rare that a product has so many winning benefits. My 2008 mid-range notebook is now getting up to 200MBs on sequential reads and 60MBs on sequential writes. That's a jump of 5x in read speed over the original HDD. The write speed is somewhat faster. Notebook now boots 3x faster. No more disk defragging for me, no more disk crashes, runs cooler and quieter. The only downside is living within the limits of this drive's capacity. You can always buy a larger SSD too.

The usual recommendation for an SSD is to buy one which supports the TRIM feature and use it with Windows 7. TRIM keeps a drive running at optimum speed. Yes, this drive supports TRIM. Very good. However, PCPerspective published an authoritative review on this drive questioning the commonly held notion that TRIM is a sine qua non feature when buying SSDs. Apparently, the drive's controller, a JMicron JMF618, has the smarts to keep the drive running at optimum speed without TRIM. If this is correct, it means that this drive can be coupled with non-TRIM operating systems such as Windows XP, Vista and RAID systems. A very radical claim indeed.

I strongly feel that SSDs are so fast and so much more reliable than a notebook's HDD that you really must buy one ASAP. You won't be disappointed. This is a very compelling SSD to buy because it has both TRIM and a superior drive controller. You can't go wrong.

first off, the picture amazon provided is incorrect... this kit comes with the external hard drive shell to be used with your current hdd that is in your laptop, after you upgrade... pictured is the desktop kit with the 2.5" -> 3.5" brackets...

on with my thoughts...

i used this ssd to upgrade my Acer AS1410-2285 laptop
Acer Aspire AS1410-2285 11.6-Inch Black Laptop (Windows 7 Home Premium)
note: ram is upgraded to 4GB/PC2-6400/800MHz

PROS:
/// currently, a great value for a new tech.
/// runs cool
/// great specs: huge performance jump in read/write speeds per my application [ymmv]
/// no moving parts = very quiet/energy efficient
/// quicker boot/program launch times
/// supports TRIM [win7]

CONS:
/// price per GB [currently at $2+/GB]
/// requires some research/initial set-up/tweaks/maintenance

OTHER THOUGHTS:
/// the included hdd enclosure is solid, but the flat-black finish attracts dirt/oil almost as much as gloss black
/// a great upgrade and a way to get your feet wet with a new tech.

this item is great for laptop applications where people do not have any heavy programs or plethora of data [docs + multimedia]... especially if you are running win7 since it is optimized for that... 64GB [mine reads 59.5 post-mount] is more than enough for me, and should be for many "standard" laptop users... after all my programs/data were put in, i have 33.8GB of free space left... currently, ssd prices are too high for it to be used as a storage device, so many people simply use it as boot drives... the only raw data i have on my drive is docs and very few multimedia, since i do not need them on my laptop... if i ever need them i will just bring it over via the external drive... as far as music goes, i have them in my itouch, so no need to have duplicate data since i almost always have my itouch on me to play music on the laptop...

i highly recommend people to do a fresh install of their os post-installation, just to get all the data/hardware on the same page: fresh start with the new drive is always good... and sometimes the cloning process might not go so smoothly... just make sure you back up all your data and the critical stuff; like the drivers; at least know where to source them... with that said, i cannot comment on the included hdd cloning software that is included with this unit... i am sure it works fine, but it is not something i would use...

all in all, i am very satisfied with my purchase... not only do i feel as i got a great deal, in the current market, but my system got a quite a bit of an upgrade... AND the battery lasts longer... my before/after crystaldiskmark scores are posted in the pictures section... i know numbers are not everything, but it sure does tell a lot... first hand experience only backs up the results i got, where the machine feels snappier in all the programs, especially during initial launch/while it opens up different files... full-boot of my os reduced to 31 seconds where it used to take twice as long @ roughly a minute... the amount of heat my system produces decreased by a huge margin... i no longer feel any heat generated by the hdd area,... to top it all off it does it without a single noise from the drive... the only thing i hear now is the fan during cpu-intensive actions, which is almost never since i do not go crazy on my laptop... you can truly HAVE IT ALL with ssd, highly recommended !!

There is no reason to go into a long review of this item because my experience is as simple as this. I installed the drive, it installed easy. I moved the data that went fine. I used the SSD drive for approx 2 weeks and it crashed and kept crashing. Their own diagnostic software said the drive has bad sectors and of course data was lost. In my opinion stay away from this Kingston drive, I don't know about the reliability of their other SSD drives but this is too cheap and poorly made to buy.