Conclusion:

The new wave of Kingston SSDNow V Series solid state drives puts an interesting new twist on their value line. With Intel's second generation controller and 34nm MLC NAND flash memory, many might argue the internals are the best presently on the market. The read performance is definitely impressive, while the write performance will leave something to be desired. Once you see the price you may be willing to make the compromise in order to jump from a traditional hard drive to a solid state drive.

While a write speed of 40MB/s might initially seem like the biggest short coming, once you have everything loaded on to your system, the majority of disk activity may be reads, so that may be a decent trade-off to get such a drive at such a low price. My biggest concern is that 40GB total capacity still isn't enough. Kingston is marketing this drive as a boot drive, and expects users to have a secondary drive for file storage, and that is about a necessity in my opinion. With a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro, I was already over 20GB, so it wouldn't take all that many applications and updates to bring the drive close to capacity. You might want to take the steps to modify where Windows automatically stores a user's items such as downloads, pictures, videos, and documents, to take them away from the default location on the C: drive and place them in a new location.

When these drives were first released just a week or two ago, the price was just over $100, but with a mail-in-rebate you could have wound up with this drive for about $85 (US). Looking around finds that the rules of supply and demand have changed things a bit, as most places are sold out, the rebate seems to have been removed, and in some cases the prices are now higher. Newegg.com is out of stock, but lists the desktop upgrade kit at $129.99, while other stores I found on Google offer the stand-alone drive for between $95 and $105. I'd say that $25-$35 difference to get the goodies provided in the desktop upgrade kit is a bit steep, and I'd like to see how much Newegg.com would offer this for as a bare drive.

At around $100, the price is definitely attractive, and I hope it is a sign of things to come (and to come soon) in the SSD market. For those that got in on the rebate, the price is very impressive, but even without it you are looking at about the best deal in SSDs to be seen so far.

The bottom line is that Kingston has put together a solid state drive that offers a mix of performance and pricing that has already gathered a good deal of attention. For everything it has to offer, the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB solid state drive earns the Bigbruin.com "Recommended" and "Good Value" awards.



Pros:

» Strong read performance
» Published transfer rate data may actually be conservative
» Internals by Intel (controller and memory)
» Very attractively priced
» Desktop upgrade kit includes items to make installation a snap
» Bootable version of Acronis to make easy work of cloning your drive

Cons:

» Write performance is well below average at 40MB/s
» Not convinced 40GB is enough for a boot drive or stand-alone