SSDNow V-Series Overview
Just like all other SSD’s the SSDNow V-Series drive comes in the 2.5-inch form factor, but you don’t need to worry because your normal SATA power and data cables will work fine with the drive. Also if you do not have a spot inside your case for the drive Kingston does include brackets with the desktop kit, although they really are not needed. SSD’s have no moving parts at all so there are no vibrations like with traditional hard drives, they are absolutely silent! Also SSD’s are very durable as you can see from the many SSD demo’s that we have seen. So basically you can put this drive anywhere in your case, even mount it with double sided tape!
The drive casing is made of aluminum, although the drive seems light the construction is very solid. On the top there is the Kingston logo and drive capacity. There is nothing on the back of the drive at all. As I said SSD drives have the same connectors as your normal SATA drives so you have SATA power and data connection.
A Look Inside
Opening the drive up we can see that both the memory chips and controller are Toshiba, but actually the controller is JMicron, don’t be fooled. Kingston told us that they have been working with both JMicron and Toshiba in creating an exclusive firmware that you will only find on the V-Series drives. This firmware fixes the lag problem that we have seen on earlier SSD’s that had the JMicron controller. They have done this by reducing the bandwidth down to 100MB/s, which gives you a better IOPS (which caused the lag problem). Also the old JMicron chip had 16KB cache whereas this one has 64KB. So you are not going to see the performance of say the OCZ Vertex drive we just tested that uses the Barefoot SSD controller from Indilinx, but you are still going to see a definite increase from your normal SATA drive. Also the V-Series drives are far less expensive than the drives with the Barefoot controller.
If you have never seen the inside of the SSD drive it is just a simple PCB board with the controller chip and memory chips. It’s crazy that is all that makes up an SSD drive!
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