Kingston SSDNow V Series 2.5" 40GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SNV125-S2/40GB

Pros: + Relatively inexpensive approaching the "hundred" USD mark. + "Intel" X25-M G2 Quality + Extremely low-power of 0.15W Active versus 2.0-2.5W Active of other SSD manufacturer/controllers. + Great for Netbooks or Ultra-Light Notebooks! + Still has that impressive Intel 4kB-block Read/Write speeds!

Cons: - Write speeds could be better, but understood that it's because it only has half the channels (5 vs. 10) of an X-25M 80GB drive. - Still over $2 USD/GB. Needs to come closer down to $1 USD/GB. - No Auto TRIM support out-of-the-box. At the mercy of Kingston/Intel to add support via firmware update.

Overall Review: * If using as primary drive for Windows 7, disabling Hibernate & Pagefile will free up a ton of space. I got my Windows 7 install down to 9GB with 31GB left free to install applications and downloads for my Acer 1410 (SU2300) 11.6" notebook. HDTune 2.55 Results: * Min: 155.8MB/s * Max: 203.6MB/s * Avg: 175.1MB/s CrystalDiskMark 2.2: * Seq (R/W): 193.6MB/46.5MB (per second) * 512K (R/W): 138.5MB/46.5MB (per second) * 4K (R/W): 21.41MB/45.01MB (per second) Drive was 17.4GB full out of 40GB during the tests. (44% full).

Pros: reasonable price for early SSD, fast read speed 160+MB/s, great random 4kb performance

Cons: below average write speeds, i contacted kingston about TRIM and i was told that there are no plans to support TRIM for these drives which really sucks.

Overall Review: don't bother putting this drive in a netbook, i used it with an atom 330 and ION and i barely had any increase in performance. i then put it into my desktop, core 2 duo 2.6 ghz and the performance increase was very noticeable. my windows experience disk transfer rate went from 5 to 7.1 after putting the drive in my desktop.

Pros: The biggest pro here is cost. Other SSDs are well out of a low end price range, and Kingston did a great job sacrificing just enough storage space to get the cost down to affordable prices. SSDs will certainly drop in price, but for someone who wants to adopt early and doesn't mind sacrificing a little space on the main drive, this is a great match. Putting it in my HP laptop was as easy as taking out the old HDD, swapping the SATA adapter from HDD to SSD, and plugging in the new drive. From there I reinstalled Windows 7. With Windows 7 Pro, a good amount of programs including Firefox and Office 2007, no hibernation, and a 2GB page file, I still have just under 20GB free, which is perfect for temporary storage until I can move things to my external.

Cons: Size, first and foremost. You will be making some compromises if you don't have readily available storage, especially on a laptop where you don't always have your external with you. Consider buying an 8GB to 16GB flash drive just for that "emergency" space. The speeds aren't quite as fast as more expensive SSDs, but it still blows regular HDDs out of the water. No competition there.

Overall Review: I used to warm my hands on my laptop's keyboard right above the HDD, I can't do that anymore because it doesn't get as hot! Oh well. As of 11/25/09, this drive does not have TRIM support. Kingston has stated that it is in the works. Can't wait for the Intel 160GB G2 to get to a decent price point.

Pros: A great, hopefully fast little SSD!! :) Hilariously small box compared to 3.5" drive retail boxes. The drive sounds hollow if you tap it. Technology is crazy. EggSaver shipping was fast!

Cons: Be careful, just because this drive is listed as Retail, doesn't mean the package includes 3.5" mounting rails, sata power & data cables, or a driver/software CD. Kingston has a "desktop bundle" SSD package that includes the accessories, I think the desktop bundle # is SNV125-S2BD/40GB for this drive. This is an SNV125-S2/40GB. It's not Retail vs OEM, but Desktop Bundle vs Retail. Just keep it in mind if accessories are important to you. I would have given 5/5 eggs if accessories were included, but that's my mistake!

Pros: Very low price for a very fast drive, especially with the rebate but even without it. HDTune reports an average read speed of 140MB/s with top speeds very near the claimed rating of 180MB/s. I put the drive into my mid-2009 MacBook Pro that is only running Windows 7- the boot time is very impressively increased, and every program loads nearly instantly. I have also noticed slightly increased battery life. There are also no moving parts in my laptop anymore, and the combination of durable solid-state drive and the aluminum body is a very reassuring combination.

Cons: The write speed is not remarkable, but I knew that before I bought it. Also, Kingston has not released an update to make the drive support the Windows 7 TRIM command, which I would like to see as soon as possible. The price per gigabyte is still somewhat high, but we're still in the early-adopter phase of solid-state drives- although, seeing Newegg and Kingston bring us the first high-functioning sub-$100 SSD is a good indicator that we're about to start leaving the early adopter phase.

Overall Review: With Windows 7, a few small programs, and all of the drivers installed, I have 25.6GB of 37.1GB free. At this point, the question is how to best use that 25.6GB. I know that most people would think that is not very much space, but I have plenty of storage on my desktop, and the laptop just isn't used in the same way for me. Also, if you intend to install this drive into a desktop, you will need to purchase a 2.5"=>3.5" adapter, as this drive is designed for laptops and will not fit into the 3.5" drive bays in your desktop.

Pros: Amazing performance gain over my old 500gb 7200rpm hard drive. Read rates went from ~81 Mb/sec to ~173 Mb/sec with bursts of ~220Mb/sec. Goodbye load screens!!

Cons: Not a big deal, but I wish it came with mounting hardware for desktops. It's currently dangling at the bottom of my case until I can order a mounting kit. Hard to complain for the price I paid though :-D

Overall Review: I didn't see as big of an improvement in boot times as I was hoping to see, but that is due to bios and not the SSD. 40gb is just enough to hold 2 games (1 being an MMO) and Windows 7, so I'm probably going to be purchasing a second one to run Raid 0. Well worth the money though!

Pros: Fast and cheap. I needed a boot drive for my HTPC, but I only had two 3.5" and two 5.25"bays in my case. I was already planning on using two Caviar Green 1TB drives (in raid 1) for the storage volume (I don't trust these spinning hard disks anymore), with a BD-ROM drive and a DVD-RW. This left no open drive bays at all, so I bought this and just velcro-ed it to the side of my case.

Cons: Seems to be not as fast as my 80GB G1 Intel SSD. Also, the Intel SSD toolbox doesn't work with this, so if I had to do it over again, I'd buy the recently released Intel 40GB drive so I could use that software. I also don't like how the price crept up to $130, but even at that price, it is still worth it to me.

Overall Review: Maybe the speed difference between my 80GB G1 drive and this 40GB drive is because I am running Ubuntu on my laptop and Win 7 on my HTPC. Ubuntu just boots faster.

Pros: This makes an excellent boot disk. Throw Win7 on it (remove hibernation, and put the page file on another hard disk), install all your applications on it, and your computer will be quite fast. Just put your games and other data on another drive. It may only be 40GB, but this is the cheapest SSD drive to date. Excellent performance.

Cons: It, like most SSDs, is not your standard 3.5 drive size. Mounting it might be tricky, depending on your case's mountings. It has screws in the right place for a regular HDD mounting. I just attached it to one side of the mounting slot with screws. It's a very light drive (in terms of weight), so I don't expect it to be a problem. Despite the price/GB storage, it's still only 40GB. I'd love it if you could get a 160GB SSD drive at a reasonable price. But for now, this is as good as it gets. Kingston hasn't released a firmware update with TRIM support, and there aren't cleanup tools for the drive. So it may suffer typical SSD problems, like slowing down after a lot of delete/write cycles. Oh, and these things are out of stock *everywhere*. Please make more of them, Kingston.