Kingston Announces 30GB SSD “Boot Drive”

Kingston has just announced the SSDNow V Series 30GB Boot Drive for desktop users looking for the performance boost of SSD without the high prices. The idea is that you would load the operating system and a few critical applications on the 30GB SSD, while keeping your space-hungry data files like photos, videos, and music, or your very large applications like games, on a regular hard disk drive.

The drive does support Windows 7's TRIM function, but the specs don't otherwise look very impressive. Sequential read speed is rated at a reasonable 180MB/sec, but sequential writes are 50MB/sec. That's quite a bit slower than the well-regarded (but expensive) SSDs from Intel, or the new drives using the Indilinx controller from several vendors. Kingston did not mention random read/write performance, which is arguably far more important to overall system speed and responsiveness.

Still, the price is right. The 2.5" drive will retail for $109.99 when it goes on sale this February, with an aggressive price promotion at launch to bring the price down to $79.99. For $15 more you can get a "desktop bundle" that includes 2.5" to 3.5" mounting brackets and drive cloning software.

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