The Aleutia Blog Our Awesome PCs use Less Power. And run on solar.

Dance-Off: Kingston 30GB SSDNow SSD vs. Western Digital WD2500BEKT (7200RPM) HDD

Update: The Kingston SSD is the most low-end consumer SSD we've come across so seemed a good idea to pit it against a 250GB 7200RPM 2.5" Western Digital HDD (WD2500BEKT) that goes for half the price.

Many of our customers need solid state drives because they are operating in difficult places. But they don't usually need much storage capacity. A school in Africa can't take the risk of a moving hard drive but because the bandwidth is so limited there isn't much that needs to be on the PC save for applications. A sailboat owner does not want a hard drive because it can't be expected to last but at the same time their navigation software (usually Sea Pro) only takes up a few GB.

That's why we are always on the lookout for smaller, less expensive SSDs that still offer fast performance. We used to sell the Pretec 8GB SSDs but because they were basically CF cards (and very slow ones) that became a bottleneck for the T1s in terms of performance.

Lately, we've shipped the Intel 40GB X25-V but it costs too much, so we were psyched to see Kingston release this 30GB SSD and immediately bought 20.

Block Output SSD: 45.306 MB/s
Block Output WD2500BEKT: 85.164 MB/s
Rewrite: 28.676 MB/s
Rewrite WD2500BEKT: 38.859 MB/s
Block Input: 126.98 MB/s
Block Input WD2500BEKT: 96.247 MB/s
Random Seeks Per Second: 1569
Random Seeks Per Second WD2500BEKT: 180.3

The Intel X25-V performed better than claimed (with read speeds of 211MB/s instead of 175MB/s). Kingston scores far lower than it claims to  but it's actually quite snappy.