Your reviewer is horribly aware that he may be coming across as a loathsome fan boy, but would like to make it clear that his Windows XP PC has a 120GB SSD as the boot drive along with two 1TB data drives to do the heavy lifting. Switching to SSD has transformed this PC and cut the start-up time from five minutes to less than one minute whilst also reducing noise and heat levels.
A partially populated front side...
There is no doubt in our mind that you should switch to SSD. Clearly, it would cost a fortune to move exclusively from HDD to SSD which leaves the hybrid SSD-plus-HDD approach as the only one that makes sense.
The question is whether the tiny 40GB Kingston is the best approach, or do you need to shell out more cash for an alternative SSD?
Opening up the casing of the Kingston drive reveals some interesting features. The controller chip is an Intel PC29AS21BA0 which is a very similar part to the controllers used in the Intel X25-M range. Indeed, we are informed by Kingston that Sata Trim functionality is "on the roadmap".
Next, we have a 32MB Micron cache chip, which isn’t very exciting, and five Intel NAND Flash chips that provide some food for thought. These chips each have 8GB capacity and are fabricated using the same 34nm process that we saw in the second-generation Intel X25-M SSD we reviewed here. You only need five chips to achieve the 40GB capacity and as a result there are five empty spaces on the upper surface of the drive PCB and ten on the bottom. That’s good as it keeps cost low. However, this is balanced by the fact that the Intel controller supports ten data channels so the limited number of chips presents a theoretical bottleneck in performance.
...and an unpopulated back
Kingston quotes a sequential read speed of 170MB/s and sequential write speed of 40MB/s. This is a fast read speed, but the write speed is very low as you can see when you compare the 40GB drive with other members of the Kingston SSDNow V series, which have a write speed of 70MB/s.
COMMENTS
@A J Stiles
"Is Windows *still* treating separate physical drives as logically separate?"
Big fucking deal, so what. Now go read up on NTFS mount points and stop being a trolling retard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_Mount_Point
Get the 64GB V+ version
Get the 64GB V+ version (Kingston SNV225-S2/64GB). It costs £109 (just £9 more than the normal 64GB version). Its write speed is 140GB/sec and its read speed is 220MB/s - much faster!
Get the 64GB version
Get the 64GB version (Kingston SSDNow V-Series 64GB Solid State Drive (SSD). It costs £100 (ie £25 extra than the 40GB version) and its write speed is 80GB/sec (ie twice as fast). It costs a little extra but it solves all the shortcomings of the 40GB version.http://www.reghardware.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/thumb_down_32.png
2 drives in a laptop...
i have an acer 5230E here, and it contains two SATA ports, one for the HDD and one for the DVDRW drive.
Should be possible to reroute the wiring internally and mount a second SATA drive elsewhere in the case at the cost of the DVD (no biggie, use an external)
:)
@thomh, @A J Stiles
@thomh
Apple was (and is) free to use it under the terms of the CDDL, as is anyone. I can only guess that they wanted different terms, probibly a patent indemnification, which sun would not give them. Of course this is all speculation, I was not party to these discussions, if they occered.
@A J Stiles
It is true that you could build your own kernel with it. The conflicting clauses only come into force when you try to redistribute.
You could also use a GPL "shim" like nvidia does (although I have heard questions about if this really gets you around the redistribution requirements of the GPL).
There is also the possiblity of a clean-room implementation. Get just the on-disk format and independently write code to handle the format.
