Here’s a little tidbit of news; nothing ground-breaking, but right in line with a trend I’ve been watching for a year or two now. Kingston has released an improved version of their enterprise SSD line with a version that internalizes TRIM support, making OS support for the SSD management utility irrelevant. At the rate Kingston and everyone else are improving base SSD technology, can it really be wise to buy in right now?
To be fair, SSDs do already (as I’m sure you well know) provide a healthy performance boost to any system, but it seems like every month there is a new advancement in drive controllers, cell density, or what have you. The benefits of waiting “just a little bit longer” are pretty substantial, as opposed to the case with GPUs, CPUs, and other forms of storage, which seem to me to be changing much more gradually.
That said, it also seems silly to buy a demonstrably inferior product for your system drive. If you can get a decent SSD for $150 or $200, why not go for it? I guess I’m just too storage-hungry to feel okay with the $/GB on even the cheapest models.
Anyway. The SSDNow V+100 (and its encrypted cousin, the V+100E) is aimed at enterprise sales, where older systems predominate, and a self-contained drive optimization system like this is likely to do some good. The technology will probably trickle down, but it also increases the cost of the drive. I don’t see a price anywhere, but the SSDNow series has traditionally been sort of average price, so these extra features will probably bump them up to a premium level.
[via Electronista]