Kingston Coming With 30 GB 'Boot' SSD for $80
Boot faster!
Massive (or at least decently sized) SSDs are still priced too far into the stratosphere to be practical replacements for traditional magnetic storage-based hard disk drives – but the performance advantages of SSDs are just far to compelling to ignore.
SSD makers are now hoping to attack that angle by offering more affordably priced solutions that can sit in a happy middle ground, but proposing small SSDs that are large enough to function as boot drives that hold the operating system and system files.
Kingston will ship next month the SSDNow V Series 30GB Boot Drive which will be promotionally priced at $79.99 after rebates (U.S. only). Performance is rated up to 180MB/sec. read, 50MB/sec. write. The SSD will offer Windows 7 TRIM support, which helps the SSD maintain high performance through the life of the drive.
"In our quest to bring SSDs into mainstream use, we're aiming to deliver a lower price point while boosting performance. The new SSDNow V Series 30GB Boot Drive accomplishes those goals," said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston. "Desktop users can extend the life cycle of their systems with this drive and IT managers in the enterprise space like it as there is less data for them to backup to the network. In addition, we will also release a 30GB SSD twin-pack for prosumers and enthusiasts who want to take performance to the next level."
Last week, Intel's 40GB X25-V drive for $130 finally arrived at retail, giving those who need a fast boot drive a solution available today.
Even though capacity may be limited, RunCore demonstrated at CES that even the most modest of computers can be given new life and become usable again with an SSD upgrade.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum-9-35.html
+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.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=328&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=7
Only in the 4KB write. In pretty much everything else, the Intel PWNS.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1022/9/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.