Kingston 128gb SSD or OCZ 120gb SSD?

Howdy guys!

Decided to bite the bullet and get myself a SSD but am tossing up between the Kingston 128gb with 200mb/sec read and 160mb/sec write or the OCZ Vertex 2 120gb with 285mb/sec read and 275mb/sec write?

Are those differences in numbers really going to make much of a difference to someone who isn't going to be benchmarking and just using it for everyday productivity? I can get them for the same price and would personally prefer the Kingston for the little bit of extra storage space if the difference isn't great. Also I've heard some nasty things about OCZ... is this ill founded? Again, all up I'd prefer the Kingston anyway.

 

Which Kingston SSD? Also, what are the prices?

 

Kingston 128G SSD V-Series SATA2 G3 is the exact one.

Both drives will be 239 AUD without postage, which again will work out to about 12 AUD each.

Just noticed you're Australian.

I'll either get the Vertex from pccasegear or the Kingston from umart.

 

Hmm.. Well, for just everyday productivity you might not really notice a huge difference between a conventional spinning hard drive and SSDs.

You seem to have enough RAM and you've already got a Momentus XT which I have heard should give a similar snappiness that SSDs can provide.

Any particular reason why you might be wanting to get an SSD?

The Kingston SV100S2/128GB has numerous bad ratings on Newegg about drive failure which should be fixed with the following firmware:
http://www.kingston.com/support/ssdnow/v100_firmware.asp

 

get the Samsung 128GB ssd. from what i have heard it has better reliability than both drives previously mentioned. And good speed: Write Speed: 220 MB/s, Read Speed: 250 MB/s. i have one and it rocks in my r2.

Samsung 470 Series MZ-5PA128 Solid State Drive - SATA II, 128GB, 2.5 at TigerDirect.com

 

there's 2 kingston versions: 1 with some encryption/back up feature and the other does not.

i am using a corsair ssd and it runs fine.

 

I am currently using the XT and I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but it's not much faster than my 7200rpm that the machine came with. Will probably opt for a complete re-install (I cloned last time).

I'll clarify a bit more. I'm a uni student, so I am constantly shutting down, starting up, hibernating, etc etc while around campus. I have a desktop for gruntier work at home, so the laptop is just for casual gaming, some music and videos and document drafting. I just generally want my apps to open faster and my system to start up quicker, and SSDs seem to offer this.

Cheers for that info on the firmware, will definitely take that into consideration.

@fedcrom

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm in Australia, so I wouldn't be able to buy it from there, might do some hunting though. I'm essentially looking at spending around 250 AUD on it, with postage if possible.

 

Do you already have Intel RST 10 installed?

 

No idea. Is there a way to check?

 

i believe someone said that the hybrid drives only work when you're reloading stuff: like a save or the same program over and over...then it gets faster because it just buffers it into the 4gb cache.

open IRST, then select 'help' then select 'about': the version number will be shown in the bottom right corner.

 

Yeah, that's what it does, and I've done all of that, but still doesn't seem to do much... I'm assuming there are some hidden processes that are bloating the cache which means it just runs like a normal 7200rpm drive...

 

as a result it probably means you're not getting the performance you'd like out of the drive. a true SSD should eliminate that!

 

My thoughts exactly! It's just a matter of which one really... I don't want to go below 120gb as I feel I'll be restricting myself too much...

 

i have an OCZ Vertex 2 and i find write speeds are lower compared to Corsair. I haven't seen any useful benchmark scores for a kingston so i wouldn't be sure on kingston: that's not to say i don't recommend i just haven't had any experience with kingston SSDs.

 

The Kingston SSD's are entry level. They have low random 4k read and write performance compared to other SSD's but they still are much faster than a traditional hard drive.

 

For all of these ~128GB drives, incompressible sequential write seems to be around 140MB/s. Not too much of an improvement IMO.

 

Stay away from Kingston, not very reliable. I would also check out the Mushkin Callisto, performs close the the OCZ without the reliability issues. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226152 Or go with an Intel drive.

 

The benchmark numbers you are quoting are sequential read/writes. Everyone quotes those numbers, because they are the "big" numbers. But the benchmark number that really indicates the relative level of performance in real-world scenarios is random read speeds. This is because most of what typical desktop users do with their computers falls into a random read pattern.

Here is a little snippet from Anandtech's Article about the OCZ Vertex 3:


An OCZ Vertex 2 would be around the 55MBps mark, on par with an Intel X25-M G2 ( source)

This graph tells me the following:

1) The SSDs based on the SandForce SF-1200 controller (OCZ Vertex 2, Corsair Force F120), or the Intel controller (Intel X25-M G2) have decent performance.
2) The Kingston SSDNow V-series drive is pretty slow by comparison
3) Mechanical hard disk drives are REALLY slow by comparison (by a factor of almost 100x)

Based on this information, I would eliminate the Kingston SSDNow V-series from consideration. I would go with the OCZ Vertex 2 120GB. It currently sells on NewEgg for ~$180 USD, whereas other drives with with equal-or-better performance sell for $230+.

 

Wow, thanks for that there kent. I think I may just go with the vertex and hope for the best. Thank you all!