Kingston Coming With 30 GB 'Boot' SSD for $80

Thats closer.... Gimme that at $60 and I'll start using them regularly.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum-9-35.html

Given how big Windows is getting (mostly because of the WinSxS folder), 30GB isn't enough IMO. Windows 7 will release SP1 and SP2 and the first thing you will notice is that it will be full and the only way you will have to fix it is to reinstall the whole thing with a slipstreamed DVD.

2 of these in RAID 0 sounds good to me!

Nice Kingston, that isn't an absolutely horrible price. 50mb/s is a lot better than Intel's budget SSD at 35mb/s at write speed.

+1. Exactly what I'm thinking. For just the OS, few games,etc you need at least 80GB.

However, if you do RAID 0 them, you can get it for a pretty decent price ($160) which isn't too bad.

HOWEVER, BEWARE that the Kingston V series doesn't use the Intel controller like the E Series, so your read/writes are going to suffer quite a bit
See: http://benchmarkreviews.com/index. [...] mitstart=7

Only in the 4KB write. In pretty much everything else, the Intel PWNS.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1022/9/

For just the OS and a few basic "productivity" apps, 40GB is enough; I'm still using my old 36GB Raptor as my OS drive.

Actually, I know the 40GB Kingston V is based on the Intel X25-M, but was "chocked" in some way, maybe this is also the case. Also note that the Kingston V does not support TRIM where even the new Intel X25-V 40GB does. However, if you are to RAID the drives, it should be of no consequence.

AMW1011 was probably referring to the new Intel X25-V 40GB (or Kingston V 40GB) which is some crippled X25-M for budget users.

As the article notes, this drive does support TRIM.

Get rid of the freakin' ads on here that make noise with no mute button!

If you know how to strip down your Windows installation by using vLite and other such programs, even an Installation of Windows 7 can be as low as 2GBs.

But yeah, for people lacking something as "technical" as that, it needs a little more space.... As a normal Windows 7 Ultimate installation would take as much as 15GB.

My OS drive with Windows 7 Ultimate install is 16.1GB. I think a 30GB SSD would be sufficient for win7. In fact my partition for my OS is 30GB and running smoothly. A lot of People don't understand what "boot" drive means. ONLY Windows goes on it. No games! No apps! Windows only!

It's too bad gigabyte wouldn't make a NAS or USB3.0 based I-Ram.

30GB supports some windows 7 features, too bad after installing windows 7, theres no space left to install other apps that will benefit from a SSD

also 50MB/s is too slow for a write speed, while it can read at 180MB/s, applications rarely ever just read, most apps do both reading and writing.

it is better to have a 1TB drive that can read and write at 110MB/s while still costing $70, than to go for a SSD with a faster read speed but slower write speed

PS one problem that SSD's still have is multitasking.

if you have a SSD, try this, copy a large file from the SSD to another drive, while at the same time, copy a file from another hard drive, to the SSD, you will understand the performance drop I am talking about. normal HDD's don't have as large of a performance drop.

a lower cost $150 ssd will generally get like a 80% performance drop in both reading and writing

another test you can do is pull out limit windows to 1GB of memory (generally done through msconfig)

then launch a demanding game like crysis or even mass effect or any other games like this
due to the lack of memory, the system will rely heavily on virtual memory
you will see that a cheap SSD will cause much more lag in the game than a normal HDD, cheaper SSD's are good at just reading but suck at writing and also suck at multitasking so they actually perform slower than a cheaper HDD that will offer more storage.

My Win 7 x64 installation is ~1.35GB, however, I use CAD, CFD, vid editing,CS4, and games like Crysis, CoD 4,etc installed, 40GB becomes quite small.

Yeah, that makes more sense.

Razor, your mistaken. You can set your os up on a ssd, these drives and experience incredible speed differences. There is almost NO writing being done to my C drive right now. This luxury cost me 100 dollars. Almost instant windows booting and shutting down. I run my browsers on C. I've had 24.5g of 40g- free for 2 months, using tips/configs/settings found on ocz forums and others. Having Windows on a ssd, speeds the whole system up because there is reading of system dlls,registry settings all the time. This is where ssd's are hundreds of times faster-random small reads. Where the drive is slow is sequential writes. But that is never being done the way I or you can set up a single ssd/os drive. If you decide to feed files to a platter drive a ssd can send as fast as anything can take it, including multi transfers.

HD Tune Pro: KINGSTON SSDNow 40GB Random Access

Test capacity: full

Read test

Transfer size operations / sec avg. access time avg. speed
512bytes17898 IOPS 0.06 ms 8.739 MB/s
4 KB 10202 IOPS 0.10 ms 39.854 MB/s
64 KB 2644 IOPS 0.38 ms 165.259 MB/s
1 MB 185 IOPS 5.4 ms 185.850 MB/s
Random 352 IOPS 2.8 ms 179.060 MB/s

1tb caviar black is where I install programs/user libraries/temp directories
HD Tune Pro: WDC WD1001FALS-00J7B1 Random Access

Test capacity: full

Read test

Transfer size operations / sec avg. access time avg. speed
512bytes83 IOPS 12 ms 0.041 MB/s
4 KB 83 IOPS 12 ms 0.325 MB/s
64 KB 77 IOPS 12 ms 4.849 MB/s
1 MB 41 IOPS 24 ms 41.348 MB/s
Random 54 IOPS 18 ms 27.857 MB/s
Windows updates are basically the only writes to my C drive.

Whatever. That's what they said last time about the 40Gb SSD now drive and it obviously was never below $100, and I haven't seen any rebates when they are in stock. And that isn't very often.

They finally got around to enabling trim, but I still doubt Kingston can hit anywhere near $80 with availability. What they should be working on is enabling trim for all those folks that have bought the 40GB drives, or any other drives they sell for that matter.

I agree with buzznut, they didn't really keep their promise of
85.00 dollars after rebate with install kit !
It was available on nov 11 for 5 hours at that price, "shell shocker"
without kit/cable.
I agree with giving us trim for that drive , before or while making this new 30 gig. I wonder if it might be the same drive, but using 10g dead space for better performance. This is said to do that. It might be why Intels 40 m drive is down to 35mb write speeds with trim, and the Kingston 40g without trim is rated for 40.

Also, I can't believe we are still having this same conversation again. Those people that are worried about sequential write speeds need to head over to Anandtech and educate themselves about SSD's.

Please show me a review of intel drives in comparison to any other SSD's where the Intel drives didn't perform the best despite the sequential writes. Intel obviously is not worried about sequential writes.

You can hang onto your mechanical drives all you want, I'm keeping all of mine in fact, but for a boot drive (which this article is about) the platter drives cannot compete. Cannot. Compete. Now go get your learn on.

I'm hoping for 1.8".
Be nice for laptops to standardize both a 1.8" for a 80GB SSD boot drive and 2.5" for a 1TB magnetic storage drive. =D

30GB? well, leaving 10GB free at all times, that leaves 20 for the OS.

Sure Win 7 can be squeezed down to 3 or 4 on it's own, but assuming you have 4GB of RAM, there's another 8GB wasted between the swap file and hibernate file, another chunk for snapshots, and then you can start installing apps... just what I grab from Ninite I considder essential, plus a productivity suite, rippers, etc (not to mention the 700MB for the HP drievrs and scanner software) and you can easily chop off another 5GB.

When i installed 7 a few months ago, by boot drive has 22GB on it. I only installed one game (which is stupid NOT to put on an SSD, but apparently that's their intent) so maybe i could have cut that back to 18GB. I manually moved each of the My Docs folders, my OST file, and anything else reasonably portable to D:. Today, my C: drive is well over 40GB. The bulk of that is crap Windows MAKES on it's own, that's not portable. Stuff in Local Apps folders and such, plus bloat from patches and updates to all the core apps, browsers, etc.

I learned the hard way even with Vista, even 32GB was not enough, and on that build the ONLY thing that got put on C: were apps required to load at boot (I used a G: drive for all other apps, including office, games, etc, anything that had to be manually launched). After 6 months I was out of space on C:. I upped it to 80GB and it ran nice at about 50GB full.

30GB is WAY too small for a boot drive today. Even my heavily locked down corporate image drive with XP is using more than 30GB and all my docs are in a home folder on a server... All that's on this machine is office apps, acrobat, CA unicenter, a few java apps, and antivirus...

I'm not even considdering an SSD below 120GB.

With such great difference between read from write, mechanism is NO good. claimed c drive or not.

however, on good side, remember stutter & problems of running 3.3volts into 1.3 volt controller. Latest items out Now have sand controller & it runs at 5.5 volt. sata is 2.2 to 5.0 volt system, so just write. although only 1gb/s to 2 gb/s at present, new items out yesterday states it can scale past 8 Gb/s when finished or More.

drashek

far "to" compelling to ignore.

How the hell are you managing that? My netbook is running XP, on a 30 GB hard drive, and I've got the OS, OpenOffice, the games Torchlight and Sacred Gold, as well as Plants vs Zombies and Peggle, Firefox, Foxit Reader, and I *still* have about 11 GB left. You're doing something wrong, clearly.

I also ran Windows 7 comfortably on my Netbook for about 7 months, never ran out of space because I wasn't trying to install things 'willy-nilly'. So 30 GB is easily enough for a boot drive, IF YOU MANAGE IT.

Come on price drops .... maybe i'll decide to actually turn my computer off every now and then rather that leave it on 24/7 cause I hate having to wait for it to boot up ....

How is that possible? Just pagefile and hiberfil would take up over 7GB of space.

Umm i already boot my OS on a SSD, have for over a year... run my other apps on a SATA 320GB HD...I don't know what's the big deal here.

I could have sworn they were selling the 40GB for $85.

The drive is supposed to be a BOOT/OS drive only. 30GB is more than enough for Windows7 and some productivity programs (MS-Office2010 may eat about 1GB). A Windows7 installation maybe 7~12GB in size. With 4~8GB of RAM, the swap file can be minimal since it cant be disabled.

You install your games, data files and everything else on a standard $80 1TB HD.

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Still, I want to see a 50~60GB drive for about $100 that do 220+ Read and 100+ write.

that mostly defeats the purpose of a boot drive. you are suppose to install the OS on it, and thus making the os much more responsive. a system with a decent amount of memory will rarely use virtual memory.

the main problem is that while windows can use multiple program locations, most installers default to drive C and some don't even give the option to change the install location. and others that do require users to select advanced install instead of typical (while both are simple, most don't) a 30GB drive is too small.

the most you can use it for is a cache disk for professional apps like photoshop, maya, and some professional video editors which will use a lot of disk space for caching instead of memory. But even then it will be useless because write speeds are too low. those apps will be very laggy compared to using a HDD for caching.