I know that you can get some serious performance boost when you add a ssd (solid state drive) to a laptop setup. The problem is, most of the drives that I can afford are slow, stuttery, or flat out buggy. Today, I made the jump and purchased a 128GB Kingston SSD. Specifically, I grabbed a SSDNow V-Series SATA2 128 GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive with Notebook Upgrade Kit Bundle. Yes, that is quite a product name, and yes I am excited.

With the Kingston SSDNow V-Series SATA2 128 GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive with Notebook Upgrade Kit Bundle, you receive a 128GB drive, external drive enclosure, USB Cable, and a licensed copy of Acronis True Image HD. The software and drive enclosure have a value of about $75, which makes the bundle price even better. Amazon had the drive kit for my notebook for an even $226. The drive itself is not a blazing fast spectacle; it advertises up to 100MB/Sec read speeds. Kingston promises a 50% speed improvement over standard 7200RPM hard drives, and a 1 million mean time before failure. More importantly, the process to upgrade, and to tools to do it are included. This is SSD for the home user, and I am loving it. If it doesn't work out, there is always Amazon's 30 day warranty, plus Kingston promises a 3 year warranty on their drive. If Kingston will stand behind it, I am willing to trust it.

I will let you know how it goes over the next couple of weeks. I am already impressed with the kit, the warranty, and the price. I hope I am impressed with the drive itself. If you have any SSD tips other than turn off defragmentation, prefetching, superfetching, move Internet caches to RAMDrives or SD card, turn off indexing, and get rid of hibernation, I would love to have them. I am new to the whole SSD game, and I am counting on th Kingston SSDNow V-Series SATA2 128GB drive not hurting too much.

Via Kingston