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The packaging will be instantly recognisable to many … Kingston are using the same red artistic man's face they have been using since they started.
Inside the box is a full kit to get everyone up and running right away.
There is a 3.5 inch mounting bracket for your chassis. A SSD USB housing case (bonus points awarded), USB cable, Sata Cable and power adapter. There is also a copy of Acronis True Image HD – which is a very capable drive backup software suite.
For those of you counting all the pennies, the drive is sold without all these extras for £10 less. Clearly the bundle we have is much better value, the USB drive caddy alone is worth the price even if you use it with another 2.5″ drive.
The drive itself comes with a three year UK warranty which is pretty much industry standard in 2010. It can withstand operating shocks of 1,500G as well as a continuous operating vibration of 2.5G.
The new Toshiba based SSD Now V+ is a direct replacement of the Samsung based drive which they only released months ago. Looking at our drive we can see we have the newer one because it is listed as SNVP325–S2B. The older drive was SNVP225-S2b. It is worth checking if you are ordering one, however I think by now that all the old stocks would be sold or replaced with the newer model.
Drive reliability has been stated to be around 1,000,000 hours which means well in excess of 110 years if you used it 24/7. Realistically we can assume that the drive should not fail within a standard operating lifetime.
Opening the drive housing was relatively easy and we can see the Toshiba T6UG1XGB drive controller on the PCB as well as a 128mb DDR Micron chip – the 9LA17-D9HSJ with eight 16GB Toshiba NAND flash modules. These are all on one side of the PCB which leaves room on the other side to populate for the 256Gb version. The PCB sits beside a non conductive thermal pad to help with shock vibration protection if handled roughly. The 128mb Micron chip is used as a cache to help random read and write performance.
Trim support will certainly be welcomed as it will help performance to stay at a constant level throughout months of everyday use. Windows 7 is the Operating system of choice for TRIM support so if you haven't yet upgraded, now would be a good time. Incidentally while other operating systems lack TRIM support some of the Indilinx and Samsung drive controllers offer trash collection options which can help with performance, long term.
The Drive Caddy is an attractively designed unit and it features a tool less design …
… Simply pull the lever to the unlocked position and pull on the cover.
The unit opens to reveal a sata-usb converter based chipset.
Slide in the drive, reseal the outer chassis and you are ready to use as a portable USB based storage device. It is a nicely thought out extra and well worth the modest premium.
