Kingston SSDNow V Series 30G Twin-Pack Review

•            30GB of non-volatile NAND Flash memory 60GB in RAID 0

•            2.5” FORM FACTOR

•            Silent

•            Reliable

•            Shock Resistant

•            TRIM

•            SMART

•            3-year guarantee

•            64MB cache

The Kingston TwinPack is a package of two 30GB SSDNow V series SSD drives. These drives have 30GB of non-volatile NAND Flash memory.  While there are larger capacity SSD drives out there the key is the performance of two of these drives in RAID 0 mode.  The drives are on the 2.5” form factor that most SSD drives use.

One advantage of SSD drives over the standard HDDs is the lack of moving parts, meaning that it is silent in operation. HDDs have actuator arms, spindles and platters that spin.  This means that a SSD drive will have higher shock resistance than standard HDDs with up to 20G on the Kingston drives in non-operation mode and 2.17G in operating mode.

The SSDNow V drives have a 500000 hours mean time before failure which is ½ that of the bigger capacity drives but is approximately 57 years by which time we will have drives with capacities far exceeding today’s terabyte drives. In any event Kingston offers a 3 year warranty on their SSDNow V series drives and it comes with 64MB of cache which is a large amount.

One of the issues with SSD drives is that if you encrypt data it must be written to a different location than the original location. Drive manufacturers alleviate this issue with a technology called wear leveling. The SSDNow V drives support the ATA TRIM command, which allows for secure file deletion and writing data over the same location on the drive.

There are three different capacities under the SSDNow V drives including 30GB, 64GB, 128GB and Twin packs like this one with 2 30GB drives in the same bundle.  Kingston offers the 2 30GB drives at a price of $164 on Newegg which is comparable to the price of a 64GB SSD drive.  The cost per GIGABYTE of a SSD drive from Kingston is nearly $3 a GB, making a HDD much more affordable for storage but performance is the forte of an SSD drive.  Here’s a list of available SSDNow V Series models:

SNV125-S2/30GB 2.5” 30GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) $85.99

SNV125-S2BD/30GB 2.5” Desktop bundle 30GB SATA II Internal SSD 93.00

SNV125-S2BD/30GB-2P 2.5” 60GB (2x30GB) SATA II Internal SSD $166

SNV425-S2/64GB 2.5” 64GB SATA II Internal SSD $114.99

SNV425-S2BD/128GB 2.5” Desktop bundle 128GB SATA II SSD       224.99

SNV425-S2BN/128GB 2.5” Notebook Bundle 128GB SATA II Internal SSD 189.99

SNV425-S2/128GB 2.5” 128GB SATA II Internal SSD $189.99

You will note that while the 64GB drive is less expensive it doesn’t have the RAID performance that two 30GB drives will have. Second there are 128GB bundles with Mail In Rebates that bring the price down. Again, without the read performance of two SSD drives in RAID 0, that makes the two 30GB drives an attractive option for those wanting the ultimate in performance.