Kingston V100 64gb SSD - is it any good?

[SickBeast]

I just ordered one. I got it for $85. I've been waiting to buy an SSD for ages, and this seemed like a decent deal.

I'm just wondering if drives like the C300 are significantly faster or if I would even notice the difference.

 

[Emulex]

yes significantly faster. i'd take a 64gb G2 microcenter all day long over that

 

[razel]

The C300 is faster, but I doubt you'll notice the difference. It isn't like the 'old' days with the infamous JMicron controllers that lag when writing. I had the Kingston V series 2 generations before the V100 and an Intel G2. With plenty of RAM (4GB+) I doubt anyone could tell the difference in everyday usage.

 

[Zap]

"Significantly faster" is for synthetic benchmarks. In real world usage you likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a "slow" SSD and a "fast" SSD (as long as the slow one isn't a crappy one like the original Jmicron).

 

[nanaki333]

"Significantly faster" is for synthetic benchmarks. In real world usage you likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a "slow" SSD and a "fast" SSD (as long as the slow one isn't a crappy one like the original Jmicron).

yep. friend is using an onyx ssd and he's never been happier with how fast windows starts and comes out of sleep. probably could have told him it was a vertex 2 and he wouldn't know (aside from the obvious label).

 

[SickBeast]

I decided to cancel my order for the Kingston V100 and I got an OCZ Vertex 2 instead. They wound up being the same price, and as far as I could tell, the OCZ drive was faster overall. I lost 4gb of capacity, but that's not a big deal to me.

Thanks everyone for your input!

I'm cloning my Windows partition onto it now and I will report back with my impressions. :whiste:

 

[SickBeast]

Ok I have the Vertex 2 up and running. It's faster than I thought it would be. Windows 7 installed in 8 minutes, booted up in 12 seconds, and shut down in 3 seconds. Firefox loads up pretty much instantaneously.

So far the one bad thing I've noticed is that it only gives me 55gb of useable storage space.

I'm not sure if I got the newer or the older revision of the drive. I've heard that the old version is faster.

 

[razel]

Glad you're enjoying the SSD. OCZ has some software that will tell you the good or bad news about which revision you have. 🙂 Since you're already there you may want to check for updated firmware. They release them often... a little too often. If you do find one, do backup. Win7 makes it ridiculously easy especially if you already have Win7 bootable media.

 

[Emulex]

55gb is good. the 50gb is also an option. sandforce eats way more reserve than intel.

intel 80gb = 74gb formatter, 40gb = 37gb formatted

 

[alexruiz]

I have the V series of 2 generations ago also (425 series or so)

It feels the same as the top SSDs for everyday usage (Microcenter G2 sandforce 1222 driven in another machine) It is also very resilient. Benchmarks are a different story, but then, as analogy, who ever played 3Dmark? 😉

 

[SickBeast]

Glad you're enjoying the SSD. OCZ has some software that will tell you the good or bad news about which revision you have. 🙂 Since you're already there you may want to check for updated firmware. They release them often... a little too often. If you do find one, do backup. Win7 makes it ridiculously easy especially if you already have Win7 bootable media.

Yeah it was a total nightmare trying to get the firmware updated to v1.32. It wound up borking my drive, and I had to re-flash it from Linux to get it working properly, plus I had to re-install Windows. 🙁

For whatever reason, the Windows firmware upgrade software did not work out for me.

Anyhow, I'll try to post some benchmarks of the drive later. So far it seems as though I got the older revision which is probably a good thing.

 

[razel]

Glad you got your drive back. 🙂 My Intel G2 recently bit the dust, but I AM SURE that it's all my fault. I recently replaced my CPU and during my undervolt stability testing it possibly sent it corrupted TRIM commands that killed some critical area. It was unbootable and the partition table was gone. Luckily testdisk found the partition intact and I got my most recent files and I did backup before the CPU change. It eventually got worse, died and considered itself a 8MB Intel bootloader. Intel's toolbox told me to contact them so it went off for warranty.

Of course I didn't admit my fault to Intel and I'm glad they're generous enough to replace it. Kingston was generous too a few years ago when I again killed a drive because I was toying around with secure erase. I never had such issues with HDDs, but SSDs are bleeding edge.

Yeah it was a total nightmare trying to get the firmware updated to v1.32. It wound up borking my drive, and I had to re-flash it from Linux to get it working properly, plus I had to re-install Windows. 🙁

For whatever reason, the Windows firmware upgrade software did not work out for me.

Anyhow, I'll try to post some benchmarks of the drive later. So far it seems as though I got the older revision which is probably a good thing.