Kingston SSDNow V-Series Notebook Upgrade Kit 128

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Kingston SSDNow V-Series Notebook Upgrade Kit 128

Jayesh Limaye, Jun 29, 2010 1600 hrs IST

This SSD doubles as a laptop hard drive and a portable hard drive

Excellent speeds, silent, cool, power saving, attractive bundle

Expensive

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Drive Features

While traditionally SSDs have been sold without anything extra than the drive itself, Kingston has tried to distinguish itself by giving something more than the drive. As we have mentioned before, this product is known as the Notebook Upgrade Kit, so Kingston provides with it a polymer drive casing that turns the SATA SSD into a portable USB hard drive. The black casing looks good and exhibits remarkable durability. There is a lock on one side of the casing that has to be slid to open the casing.

There is a single mini USB port present on the casing, which can be connected to the PC using the provided USB cable.

The screwless casing can be easily opened by pressing a small button at the bottom, which releases the back section, revealing the interior where there is the Kingston V-Series 128GB SSD.

The SSD sports a 2.5-inch form factor, which is the same as that of a laptop hard drive. It is extremely lightweight, making it suitable to be used in a laptop or a netbook. With a metallic covering and a matte finish, it is ruggedly built. The capacity is 128 GB, which may seem a little less in today's world of high data usage.

The drive features a SATA interface - this is the faster and now common 3.0 Gb/s SATA-II. The drive is completely encompassed into the protective shell and no part is exposed. This prevents it from static charges.

To complete the upgrade kit, Kingston has also provided a drive cloning software from Acronis, which lets you simply and easily clone your current hard drive to the new one in a matter of minutes. You therefore do not need to waste time installing the operating system, drivers and software again.

This SSD is based on NAND flash technology and boasts of ten channel memory for a higher continuous data throughput. SSDs are based on two technologies - MLC (multi-level cell) and SLC (single-level cell). MLC has a lower lifespan and is slower, but it is less expensive. SLC is more expensive, but has a longer lifespan and is faster. This drive is based on MLC. It has a new JMicron JMF618 controller, which also supports TRIM and brings better performance to this value SSD.

Due to the inherent nature of flash memory, the drive has a limited lifespan. Thus if data is written to a specific part of the NAND flash repeatedly, its life shortens. But Kingston has tried to take care of this by means of a wear-leveling feature which distributes data all over the drive rather than concentrating it to a particular part. This effectively increases the overall lifespan of the drive.