Kingston SSDNow V Series vs Intel X25-M

both are SATA II.

I have been told the kingston uses more power. How much more does it use?

What is the speed difference between these 2 drives?

Any other major differences between them?


Price of the Kingston is 125.00 after MIR
Price of Intel is 229.00

 

the intels are better in every way other than price
but having said that i got a Kingston because it was cheap lol
and love the extra speed over a HDD

 

no matter how good Intel can be, I would go with the Kingston for that price, assuming it is a stable drive, i.e. no known problem.

The jump from HDD -> SSD is big(well whether it worths it is another matter). The difference between SSD 1 -> SSD 2 is incremental(performance wise).

 

I have both - Intel for my main notebook, Kingston for my netbook. Both are good, but the Intel is just better. Altho as chimpanzee said and is spot on - the jump from a HDD is what will be most notable.
Have heard the Kingston's consume more power, however has helped my battery life in my netbook. Could get max 4 hours before, now can easily get close to 6.

 

And considering the kingston is cheaper for around 75bucks.

 

If Kingston will be your first SSD, I guess you should go for that, but I don't bother with their drives. I first had an Intel X25m which I loved, now using a Vertex 2.

Also what size is that Intel you're looking at for that price, guessing 160GB? I got my 120GB Vertex for $180 which I would do again rather than the Kingston 128GB at $125 any day. But any SSD > HDD almost all the time unless you're looking for a simple storage drive.

 

Benchmark Numbers are pulled from StorageReview.com.

Power Consumption: (Idle / Load)
Kingston V-Series: 1.2W / 4.5W
Intel X-25M: 0.6W / 1.6W
Typical 2.5" SATA 7200rpm mechanical HDD: 1.3W / 2.7W

The difference in battery life will depend on what kind of computer you have, and the power draw of the other components in your laptop. But as a starting point, you can assume you're losing about 10% battery life by going with the Kingston V-series over an Intel X-25M or even a typical mechanical HDD. If your battery typically lasts 3 hours, you can expect about 20 minutes less battery life.

Speed Difference (Random 4KB read/write):
I'm only listing Random 4KB read/write speeds, because that is arguably the most important speed when it comes to determining a drive's performance. This is also where you make-or-break an SSD, and separate the mediocre drives from the top-performers.

Kingston V-Series: 9.9MBps read / 9.3MBps write
Intel X-25M Series: 15.4MBps read / 41MBps write
Typical 2.5" SATA 7200rpm mechanical HDD: 0.2MBps read / 0.5MBps write



The two drives really aren't in the same class of performance. The Intel X25-M is more like a Ferrari - one of the fastest, most expensive SSD's you can buy. The Kingston V-series SSD is like a Toyota Camry - middle-of-the-road performance that is "good enough" for most people, at a very affordable price.

If all you care about is performance, get an Intel X25-M or an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD. But if you are willing to sacrifice some performance to get an incredible deal on an SSD, jump on the Kingston V-series deal before it expires.

 

I would recommend against OCZ - the latest Vertex 2's use 25nm NAND, which is 20-50% slower than the old 34nm NAND on current-generation controllers. Also, it doesn't last nearly as many write/erase cycles, so you'll also lose user-accessible space to extra spare area. To top it all off, OCZ tries to hide all of this as much as possible, so you won't know whether your shiny new Vertex 2 is using 25nm or 34nm NAND until you try to format it (and possibly notice that the size in bytes is a few GB short of what's stated on the box).

Unless if you like playing SSD Russian Roulette, if you want Sandforce, go with Corsair or GSkill or one of the other vendors. Then again, given how Marvell's next-gen controller is now shipping (Corsair already has a drive already using it on the market and the Crucial C400 should be out soon too), those looking for the absolute fastest SSD may want to skip Sandforce's 1000-series controllers altogether.

 

OCZ is a brand I would never touch. And using 25nm NAND in a same size SSD is close to cheating because there is no way it can get the same speed as using 34nm other than their 'famous' ATTO which doesn't matter as you can use no NAND

 

At this point, I'm just wondering how much longer it'll be until we see one of the tech news sites announcing that OCZ is now in a class action lawsuit for false advertising. Even if they manage to excuse the speed difference through ATTO (in the eyes of the law at least), there's more than a few people out there who are pissed that their full-price 120GB Vertex 2 is actually a 115GB Vertex 2.

 

thanks guys for the info on the 25nm Vertex 2's. So with that the drive size was decreased as well as speeds? What is ATTO?

Whatever the case, I checked my drive and in OSX Disk Utility shows 120.9 GB and in properties shows 119.6GB, so I'm okay right?

 

Personally i'd recommend the Intel X25, if you shop ebay enough the 80GB can be had for $120-$150 (new) and those prices will drop even further with the pending release of the G3's, at a $1.50/GB there's no better time than now to enter the SSD market IMO.

 

with 25nm, they use fewer chips. Fewer chips means slower speed.

ATTO is a benchmark program which the industry use to measure SSD speed. SF being using compression can achieve very high score in ATTO which just use all 0s or 1s. So ATTO score is meaningless for SF drive.

 

Oh and before I start a mass panic: For those who already own Vertex 2's, if you got yours before around mid-January 2011, you probably have 34nm flash so there's nothing to worry about. The 25nm NAND is a very recent thing.

On the other hand, if you got your drive last week or something, you might want to run CrystalDiskMark or AS SSD before the return period lapses.

One other thing you can check for is the firmware version - if your drive shipped with older firmware, then you're safe. Unfortunately, I'm not entirely sure which firmware versions beyond 1.24 are 100% safe, and what muddies the water even more is that OCZ is claiming that even today some drives that are coming off the assembly line are using what's left of their 34nm NAND stock. Perhaps chimpanzee, you might know more?

 

^ yeah I ordered mine from NewEgg Jan. 10th, assuming they had stock when they shipped, it was from a previous batch so, I think I'm okay. I would run a benchmark but I don't have it installed anymore as I sold my MBP and waiting on a refresh =) again thanks for bringing this to my attention. I will have to fully endorse the X25m now for this thread.

 

Intel all the way. Use Intel, Kingston, OCZ, all good performers, but the Intel is hands down the best all around performer with good power consumption. Kingston V-series (SNV425) is definitely a power hog. Ended up putting it in my desktop because of that.

Looking forward to price drops and what Intel has to offer for G3's since I will most likely buy a larger Intel and put this 80GB into my new Dell mini netbook.

 

I have both a V series and V+. The V series isn't the best SSD on earth. Runs surprisingly hot for a SSD and it gets the same battery life as a normal hard disk drive. Speeds aren't amazing either. Not bad for the price, but I would rather have an Intel SSD for a little extra.

The Kingston V+ Series is a completely different story. But you're looking at a V series.

 

If the price of the Kingston is only 125 dollars which is <1.00/GB does that seem to make it better in the minds of some?

 

The V series is not a bad performer. Most any SSD is not a bad performer compared with an HDD. It will most definitely be an improvement over any HDD by a long margin, and to most users you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between different SSD's for general use, unless you like to take a stopwatch to every app you open or unless you want Windows to boot faster than anyone else.

4k reads are your best performance number to review for the most part since those are the types of files Windows manages the most. HDD's 4k read or write is < 1.0 where most SSD's are > 10 (many much greater). Not to mention access times for SSD's are virtually zero where hard drives are ~15-20ms. So you can see the difference right there, even if you get a lower end SSD, it still performs significantly better than an HDD.