Kingspec SSD, are they any good?

I am looking to install a 64 gig ssd in my cf-18. I am looking for a pata unit as I understand that they are compatable with the ide connection. I would look into sata, as there are adapters available for them, but I dont really know what I am doing and I dont want to get the wrong one or mess up modifying one.

I was wondering if any one has tried Kinspec? Are they any good? I cant seam to find a Transcend 64 gig pata. I was also wondering about Runcore, but they seam more expensive than others.

Ideas? Also am I right in thinking the pata is a "non adaptor required" ssd? I can modify the caddy or whatever else I need to do to make it fit. I am very mechanically able, I just dont know computers that well. If the pata is not a plug and play connection, what is needed? THANKS!

 

I put a Kingspec 16GB SSD into a CF-18 used on my Harley. The parallel interface (IDE a.k.a PATA) works fine without any adapter, plugs right in and runs great. Be sure to get the 2.5 size SSD, most of the 1.8 SSD's are ZIF connectors that don't plug into the caddy connector.

I checked its performance after installing and it ran a bit slower than spec for block read/write, and much slower for random read & write. Yes I was careful to do the 4K block alignment when installing Win XP. It does seem faster than a fast conventional hard drive (Samsung HM160HC) although I didn't run the numbers on the Samsung.

No idea how well the Kingspec will last. But with the vibration of the Harley I'm betting any SSD will last longer than a spinning hard drive would.

 

Which Kingspec have you used, an SLC or MLC?

There are two different controllers, JMF602 & SM2235, which one you got?

 

There's better offerings than the Kingspec. Suggest you review http://forum.notebookreview.com/panasonic/545481-sata-ssd-cf-18d-4.html#post7052607. There's a $50 sata-to-pata adapter thant plugs into the CF-18D giving you complete freedom to go a Indilinx/Intel/Sandforce 2.5" sata SSD instead. There's benchmarks at http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-1-8-zif-pata-ssds-available.html#post6861746 to give you an idea of what performance would be like.

 

I get where your coming from on performance but, not all Toughbook's sit on a desktop. Some are used in an Industrial environment and get knocked off the side of a machine on a regular basis. Some of the guy's that have used a sata-to-pata bridge have suggested you are undoing the ultra ruggedness that Panasonic have purposely created.

It's an Ultra Rugged Notebook intended for the abuse often encountered in hostile environments. If there is any drop test data to support that the above "Cuts the Mustard" somebody point me in that direction.

I'm wanting my "Cake and Eat it", better performance without sacrificing the ruggedness that attracts people to buy a toughbook.

 

I have the MLC model KSD-PA25. Not the fastest SSD but 16GB for less than $60 shipped meets my need for vibration proof storage at low cost.

 

Three of us singing from the same "Hymn Sheet". It's a straight swap 2.5" for 2.5" no hacking the foam in the caddy that's intended to reduce the shock loading on the drive. Ironically, the sata-to-pata bridge that I ordered last week as a "look-see" arrived in today's post, if I said it epitomises the Oxford English Dictionary definition of "Fragile" I mean it's one drop and it's "History".

Performance boost yes please, compromising the ruggedness, no thank you.

 

...so it sounds like there are no issues? I will get one ordered today.

thanks!
ryan

 

I have been looking at newegg.ca and would rather pay the extra or wait untill its on sale than get it from a china seller. At least you will have a Manufacturer Warranty from newegg...not sure about the china seller
Newegg.ca - Transcend TS64GSSD25-M 2.5" 64GB PATA MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

You better recheck your listings before you ASSUME that you have a MANUFACTURER Warranty from NewEgg; the status display LCD failed on the case my current computer is built in after 35 days; I figure no biggie since the listing on NewEgg says 1 year warranty from MFR.

WRONG! You read the disclaimer at the bottom of every listing, it says they do their best to ensure that information is correct, but the manufacturer has the final say, yadda, yadda, yadda...

Anyways - so I contact the manufacturer (Broadway Com Corp) figuring hey, they're going to want to take care of a customer and send out a replacement part under warranty so I don't have to dismantle my new PC to return the case. They respond saying that my purchase is out of warranty, as they only warranty for 30 DAYS but they'll send me a free replacement for only $14 S/H. I reply that their listing on NewEgg clearly says 1 YEAR, and that it's absurd to suggest I should pay them $14 for a part to fix a $20 box; particularly for a part I know I can ship for $2-$8 depending on carrier. No thanks.

NewEgg RMA-ed the case the same day, and they even bothered to apologize for the inconvenience; something the MFR never did. I kept the defective part as a spare for the replacement NewEgg sent; later I discovered a defective (NOT BLOWN) SMD Fuse which I repaired by piggybacking a similar GMS fuse with pigtails. Total cost: 29 cents plus about 30 min labor.

Had I not been so torqued off at the MFR I probably would have done the troubleshooting first; but I was going to take that case out of their hide at that point and NewEgg gave me the tools to do it.

The sad part is I REALLY like everything about the case; the layout is great with bottom mount PSU and a sharp looking integrated Optical drive bay and excessive cooling vents, and you can't say anything bad about the price. If I could buy the same case again from another manufacturer I would in a heartbeat.

So YES, NewEgg DID make good on that warranty; but it COULD have gone much differently.

mnem
Qapla'! - Klingon for "BLEEP off and DIE!"

 

It does appear that Kingspec is one of the remaining companies that makes 2.5" PATA SSDs. ZIF PATA being far more available.

It's obvious then there is a market for a sturdy ZIF to 2.5" IDE enclosure so it could house one of the EWS720-based ZIF SSDs instead. Those SSDs offer great performance, battery life improvements and price. The Renice K3-E series even featuring a conformal coating on the circuitboard to protect against environmental hazards.

 

So is the Kingston 128GB SSDNow V + Series any good like this one Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB (SATA SSD) Hard Drive - eBay (item 160535218302 end time Jan-25-11 09:12:30 PST)

 

The above drive is far better than the one I am currently using. So it's not the drive that the question mark is against, or for that matter, any of the drives featured in nando4's Review and Benchmarks.

The issue from my side of the fence is the reliability and performance of the sata-to-pata bridge you will be using with that or any other drive.

 

+1. The sata-to-pata bridges introduce three issues:

1. additional power overhead to do the translation. Anything from 0.5W-1W. That can be significiant if have a low power setup and wish maximum battery life.

2. problems with sleep/standby as seen with the Runcore ProIV on their forums.

3. some bridges cannot transmit TRIM commands which means you're reliant on the SSD's GC instead.

My experiences is the Marvell sata-to-pata bridge as featured in the Renice K3VLAR (Indilinx) has no issues with 2 and 3 above. The Jmicron JM20330 has issues with 3 and probably 2.

Can read a users experiences b/w different bridge chips here and here with the ebay caddy=Marvell.

For highest compatibility I'd recommend a Marvell sata-to-pata chip OR a native PATA SSD such as the Kingspec or perhaps a EWS720-based ZIF unit in a ZIF-to-2.5" IDE enclosure/adapter.

 

I think I might pass on the kingston because you can not upgrade the firmware

 

Do you know of a source for SATA to PATA 2.5 hard drive adapter boards with the Marvell chip? All the ones I have seen are the Jmicron JM20330 chip. They have been inconsistent in compatibility and quality. Ebay versions anyway.

sata -pata drive adapter.

 

You are pretty much confirming my findings. All the ebay IDE-to-SATA, ZIF-to-microsata and IDE-to-microsata adapters I've seen are either Jmicron JM20330 or Sunplus. I know Photofast V3 ZIF SSD uses the Sunplus chip which they disbanded quickly due to incompatibility reasons.

The ebay sata-to-pata optical bay caddies use the Marvell 88SA8040 chip, which duplicates what Lenovo used initially in their ultrabays.

I did contact [email protected] about their adapters who could make a Marvell one, but wanted a 100 ordered at $6 a piece, as you see quoted here.

Could be an idea to contact polotek and ask them to make a Marvell based adapter?

 

Wow, I'm a bit surprised. Not that I have $600.00 to invest, but for $6 a pop to design and mfg a board seems like a cheap price. If they worked, reselling the balance for a modest profit should be easy. Especially if shipping from here in USA.
But to invest $600.00 on a maybe it will be better idea, is more of a gamble than I am willing to take. It is good to know that's the chip Lenovo choose. I imagine they researched and tested it much more than we could.

 

You don't know - they may already have produced it/be producing it for another party and already have the tooling. Then it's just a matter of setting up for a production run...

mnem
Think global, buy local.

 

For those interested in installing an SSD, ZDNet is running a series on these drives with step-by-step tweaking instructions and empirical before/after speed comparisons. Also some links to good explanations of TRIMMing SSDs and to software for monitoring and measuring performance:
Windows 7 and SSDs: Setup secrets and tune-up tweaks | ZDNet

 

Hi Springfield. I am doing exactly the same. I have bought a 16GB SSD Pata from Kingspec also. I have Windows XP home edition I want to put on it. Please can you advise how and where and when exactly you "do the 4K block alignment when installing Win XP"? Would really appreciate it as I need to do the same thing please.

 

Here are some pretty good instructions:
Guide RAID / Non-RAID Partition Alignment for max performance

There is a site thessdreview.com that has a lot of good info, beginner and advanced, but they seem to be off-line at the moment.

The easy way: I use a hard drive cloning tool called HD Clone, and the latest version has a check box to do a 4K alignment on the target drive.

 

Thank you.

 

BTW , welcome to the forum. Click on the link in my sig for thessdreview. Great site and they would be more than happy to help you out.

 

Words to the Wise:

I wanted to replace the 40gb drive on my eight-year-old Dell D500. I bought two 64gb pata KingSpec drives ($250). I try to keep good backups, and I like to keep a mirrored version of what I'm using in case of some type of catastrophe (serial virus, crash, etc). That's why I purchased two drives.

Well, the boot performance greatly improved, but both drives failed within a month after I purchased them.

I had backups of most everything, with the exception of a handful of Excel, Word, and Outlook files that were only on the ssd, and I couldn't retrieve.

Although I should have a 6 month warranty, I will probably not take advantage of it because like most people, I have quite a lot of personal information (account numbers, passwords, etc) that I just cannot take a chance on leaving my possession.

I could in no way recommend these drives to anyone, and instead of trying anything like this again, I will probably just pay the money for a new laptop.

 

@DesertFan

Can you post the model number of the drives you purchased & the seller.

Thanks.

o.g.

 

My drives are KingSpec SSD 2.5" Pata 64gb. The model number on the label is:
KSD-PA25.1-064MJ.

I prefer not to say anything about the seller, as I really think he is just the middle man, and is not the actual manufacturer. I really think I just threw away money on some junk

 

There's BAD NEWS & BAD News, which do you want first?

There are forum members who are "Up to Speed" & those of us who are still on the "Learning Curve" in the SSD arena. The former are suggesting that there are still major issues even with the latest generation MLC drives, so I'll take their comments on board. With regards to your drives, not only are they first generation MLC,(iffy, iffy, iffy)but they use the first generation Jmicron (JMF602) Controller, which has it's own issues.

I've still not "Dipped my Toe" but I'm aware that Kingspec offered an alternative to the JMF602 controller which is the Silicon Motion SM2235. It would be useful if someone with the Kingspec SLC/JMF602 or SLC/SM2235 gave us an update on their findings.

Note; neither the Nand Flash or the Controllers are manufactured by Kingspec,will that stop them getting a slating?

Doing your "Home Work" is the way forward, & to use a quote from Crusty ol' TinkerDwagon; "you don't ALWAYS get what you pay for, but you DO always pay for what you get". Which is not much consolation for DesertFan.

I can hear the bells chiming, so chime in with your up-dates.

o.g.

 

There are still a few 8GB and 16GB PATA SLC drives on the market, but the 16's are getting harder to find. A year or two ago there were 32GB PATA SLC drives on the market (Transcend I think ~$300ish), but those have gone the way of the beak nosed weasel.

I would try to avoid any MLC drives if at all possible, they are temptingly less expensive, but you get lower performance and reliability.

For some reason the filter on this website blocks squido o links. But I have an old article on the website relating to SSD optimizations.

Just remove the underscore to access the article:

squ_idoo.com/ssd-optimization-and-information

(If I am violating some forum rule feel free to erase this post)

Kingston drives are rebranded Intel SSD's however their lack of firmware support makes their lower cost not worth it in my opinion.

Top of the line drives at the moment:
20GB Intel SATA ~$120
8GB Transcend PATA ~$90-120
16GB Transcend PATA ~$160-$200 (If you can find one)

 

There's some very good choices still available in 2.5" PATA form. The Renice E7 below recommended as a native PATA solution bringing a nice performance boost while keeping power consumption low. The bridged solution bring with them at least another 0.5W usage to run the bridge chip. So on order of recommendation:

Renice E7 2.5" PATA SSD (Eastwho EWS720 native PATA controller)

OWC Mercury Legacy Pro 2.5" PATA SSD (Sandforce SF1222 + sata-to-pata)

Runcore ProIV 2.5" PATA SSD (Indilinx BF + Jmicron sata-to-pata)

MyDigitalSSD 2.5" PATA SSD (controller=??, performance specs look like Indilinx BF + sata-to-pata)

 

I have been looking at this but it says 40 pin in the description and the picture shows 44. I emailed mydigitaldiscount but no answer. I have a 44 pin connector and could sure use a cheap SSD to brighten up the old laptop.

Any chance that you can shed some light on this? The other drives that you point to are 44 pin.

Thank you

 

@Squeeto;

Those drives use a 40 pin connector plus 4 pins for master/slave selection resulting in 44 pins, which CAN be misleading, they do NOT fit a 44 pin connector!

Your 44 pin connector plus 4 pins for master/slave selection gives 48 pins, which CAN be misleading, they DO fit a 44 pin connector.

Are you "On The Ball" or is it misleading??

o.g.

 

They say it is a 40 pin but count the pins on the drive in the picture, 44 + 4!
Unless they took a picture of a standard 44 + 4 and photoshopped their own label on it. But who would do this? I am thinking that marketing got it wrong and are just slapping their label on someone elses oem product.

 

Problem has been fixed.
MyDigitalSSD drives are now stated as 44 pin.

I have ordered one. Let me know if you want a benchmark test and what software to use.

 

In the words of a famous tv sports pundit: "You Cannot Be Serious Man!"

Yesterday, the product label & the item description said 40 pin, after receiving your e-mail it's all changed to 44 pin. must be one of those; have a go, if we get it wrong, we'll try again moments.

This time tomorrow they will have re-branded them; "My Mickey Mouse SSD" Buy One....Get One Free lol.

I'm not trying to put a downer on this, but, the comments of others who have "Been There" are:

The options in Pata form are comparatively limited & expensive, hence the earlier invitation to those with Pata SLC drives to tune in with an update on their performance....said the dumb man to his deaf sister!

@Squeeto, tune in when your new baby arrives, we'll run a couple of benchmarks trying not to st..st..stutter as we do it. If you can open the case & identify the nand flash & controller all the better.

o.g.

 

Let me make a few points about PATA SSDs. Many SSDs with IDE interfaces are first generation products when the details of how SSDs work (especially how they do writes) was not well understood.

Most who are looking for IDE SSDs want to upgrade older laptops where physical space in the drive bay is at a premium and SATA/PATA adapters won't fit (as is possible in desktops). Most are doing this to replace laptop boot drives. The IO pattern is likely to be lots of smaller reads and writes. If you look at benchmarks, pay especial attention to random 4K reads/writes -- you won't be doing too many larger sized IO's (nor too much sequential stuff) -- so don't be dazzled by the high performance of large block IOs. Also don't pay a lot of attention to quoted aggregate IO bandwidths in excess of 50MB for read and writes. IDE interface limitations mean you can't realistically expect to get above 50MB.

You are doing the conversion to an SSD because the average access times (latency + track to track access) are effectively zero. For even very fast 7200 rpm HDDs these times are going to be in the 10ms to 20ms range -- these access times far outweigh IO transfer times -- so SSDs (even with slow transfer times) will appear blazingly fast compared to HDDs when doing boot drive/OS IO patterns.

All that being said, the first generation products tended to have really bad performance degradation the more they were used -- this was due mostly to imperfect understandings of how an SSD does writes. Early controllers (especially the Jmicron one) were very bad with this. The Indilynx first gen controller was pretty good, and the Sandforce controllers are superb. If you can get controller info (vendors are loath to provide this info) go with Sandforce or Indilynx. I have used Runcore SSDs with Indilynx controllers -- they seem ok.

Any SSD right after installation will seem really great. The real test is whether the performance is maintained for month after month of hard use. Putting an SSD drive in and using it for a few days and reporting great results is often misleading. Either lengthy use or special "heavy wear write" benchmarks are necessary to accurately evaluate an SSD. Sites such as Tom's hardware do a really good job with this -- unfortunately they only test SATA drives because that's where the market is.

 

Drive came:

The label (sticker) still says 40 pin though.







This is tested on XP with an AMD Athlon 64, 3000+.

How does this compare to the RunCore?

 

Not that fast ,is it
The 160GB regular hard drive that I recommend reviewed here
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...worlds-fastest-ata-ide-mobile-hard-drive.html

Makes the SSD look like an old 4200rpm hard drive

Test with hdtune when its installed with windows in the Toughbook

 

The real issue seems to be that I haven't been able to get the drive out of DMA mode 2.

 

Yesterday I read a report at Toms Hardware that covered the relability of SSDs from an industry viewpoint - the concensus was that the only game in town were Intel SLC SSDs. One manager of a server farm had to return 5 out of 20 of a delivery as being defective, and Kingspec could have been the makers, but I can't swear that I remember correctly. However, that would seem to be bear out the experiences of a previous poster vis-a-vis the reliability of Kingspec SSDs.
The report didn't deal with speed, but as reliability is still so variable with these comparatively new devices, I'd rather have a slow SSD that kept working than a hot device that only lasted a month.

 

@Squeeto,

I've got my hands full at the moment, I'll tune in later.

Are you running that in a primary bay or an optical bay?

If your answer is optical bay, the bios may force UDMA Mode 2, in which case you can check out nando4's optical bay drive thread, it covers forcing UDMA Mode 5.

o.g.

 

I know that I am hijacking this thread now. Sorry.
But thank you.

orange_george
Primary (only) drive.

Since I am running XP, I had to partition with Vista.
So the drive is aligned with:
Create partition primary size=5000 align=1024



The old drive was having its own issues and was degraded to PIO but after un/re installing it would return to mode 5. This trick doesn't work for the SSD.

 

Okay, I think that this is a fairer estimation of the drives capabilities (should you consider buying one):

My bios has been holding DMA to mode 2. Or probably the SSD isn't backwards compatible to tell the bios that it is capable of mode 5. Either way, I have one of those Phoenix bioses that has like 3 settings you can adjust - date/time, ECP/EPP and boot order! So I updated the driver to nVidia's instead of MicroSoft's.


This works for my nForce3 chipset-




So I am now at least drive partition aligned and running in DMA mode 5-



Hope this helps someone.

 

Excellent info, Thanks!

 

It's rtreads thread & he's not revisited with an update, so no problem.

Wow, not quite what I was expecting, so I've done a fresh install of XP_SP2 on my 7.5 year old stock 4200rpm hdd (the one I threw out long ago) that makes your write figures look poor considering the age gap & technological difference.

Thanks to the newbie guy's for tuning in, I'm conscious of not being dazzled by the high performance of large block IOs, but in this case, where are they? The random 4k reads are better than my current 5400rpm HM160HC & WD2500BEVE, with that said, they are around half of what I was expecting & with my current drives I've not got any of the degradation issues associated with the MLC drives.

I'm accepting that we are looking at first generation drives & there are significant differences between the access times of ssd's & conventional hdd but I'm either missing some critical information that would make the above ssd acceptable or I been sat on the fence for several months with good reason.

o.g.

 

For out of the box, these are reasonable results for a PATA SSD, if not great. As I mentioned above the real test comes when every flash page of the SSD has been written to at least once -- so that writes involve a read, erase, write cycle. Does the controller effectively deal with deleted sectors? If after many many writes, the drive appears to "stutter" and performance goes into the toilet, then you have a 1st gen controller, and a not very attractive SSD. It is hard to test this effect out of the box without specialized benchmark tools. You get best results with an OS/controller pair that supports the TRIM (or TRIM equivalent) operations. Win7 is the first MS OS to support TRIM.

 

Sort of on topic, I've got a 32GB Transcend drive. I'm using it in my Toughbook CF-28. Are these drives any good? Mine cost me $115 on Newegg.com and now it's running Win2K quite nicely

 

Does Ubuntu or any of the Linux OS have TRIM?

 

While the Kingspec seems to be the one most known, there are others; such as the Transcend 32GB SSD, 2.5- Inch, IDE, MLC

 

Agree to a point. With regards out of the box performance, lower access times and faster random transfer rates should overcome the, sitting on the desktop looking at the egg timer, which is what I get with my current HM160HC's. I've purposely added the 's because I was impressed with them enough to buy two. I'm in too much of a rush to get things done, but I wasn't born that way, it's the way the world is, or a least the one I'm living in.

So buying a slow out the box ssd, adding a few months of read, write, erase & re-write cycles, end's in another shopping trip with the added down time & expense.

All credit to Desertfan for tuning in with his bad experience, I'm gutted for him, but if your buying policy is to buy the first thing you see, Mr Murphy's Law will catch up with you, more often than he will with me. That should be the kiss of death that catches up with me sooner that I would like.

I've ordered a Transcend SLC, checking the spec's on the Transcend site, as apposed to Amazon or the likes, I came across the following;

*Note: For OS installations, SLC version is recommended

o.g.