Kingston SSDNow V100 64GB SATA II 3GB/s 2.5 Inch Solid State Drive SV100S2/64GZ
Review by S. McLean : SSD brings the snap back to your system

I picked one of these up on sale and bought an adapter to place it in the modular bay of my laptop. It's cheap, very fast compared to a mechanical hard drive and brings the snap back to opening apps etc. Granted, you might see some benchmarks showing this drive is not as fast at writing as some other more expensive drives, but at 145MB/sec, you are going to be pleased. You need to remember that SSD does not need defragmentation, just ensure you are running Windows 7 so it takes advantage of a feature called TRIM.

OK benchmarks.
System: Dell M4500 laptop, 8 GB ram, Kingston SSDnow V100 64GB drive as boot/C: Apps installed to C: Secondary drive: Seagate Momentus XT 500GB used for data storage

Windows 7 load time to the control ATL DEL login screen (this does not include memory check times, it's when it says "Starting Windows") 11 seconds.
Windows 7 Shutdown time 21 seconds
Internet Explorer 9 Beta load time, 1.5 seconds.
Office 2010 Word load time 2 seconds

The only other recommendation I can make is to ensure 64GB is enough for all of your apps, temp, swap etc. For most people it should be plenty, but I have a lot of programs installed, so I should have went with 128GB.

The best dollar per system improvement I have spent, extra memory won't necessarily make your system feel faster, but an SSD will.

Kingston SSDNow V100 64GB SATA II 3GB/s 2.5 Inch Solid State Drive SV100S2/64GZ
Review by John Hamel : Good first SSD - what you want to know

What regular people will want to know:
Any SSD is going to be a great upgrade for your computer if you don't have one already.

This is easy to install and everything was set correctly for it automatically on Windows 7 Pro. Programs load an average of 2 to 3 times faster. Big enough to hold Windows and a normal amount of programs, and being one of the cheapest SSDs that can do that, it makes a great first SSD.

Downsides are that it's not as fast as some SSDs, and it doesn't come with an adjustment bracket or SATA cable for putting it in desktop. (SSDs are smaller than regular desktop hard drives)


And some more tech-minded info:

Sustained reads/writes are very good, about as good as you could expect from a 64GB SATA II drive. Random reads/writes are much slower than most SSDs but still way better than spinning drives obviously. I recommend anandtech for comparing exact numbers. You may want to consider the C300 or some other drive if you want the fastest possible loads times for SATA II.

Windows correctly detected the drive, turned off defragmenting, turned on TRIM, so no problems there. There are a bunch of tweaks you can do to save space or improve performance there is a good list and discussion here: [...]

Kingston SSDNow V100 64GB SATA II 3GB/s 2.5 Inch Solid State Drive SV100S2/64GZ
Review by Marton B. Anka : Great laptop upgrade

It's not the fastest SSD, nor is it the largest or the cheapest. Sort of a middle-of-the road product. It is, however, quite reliable (as Kingston products in my experience generally are) and of course it's several orders of magnitude faster than conventional harddrives. It went into my wife's aging MacBook and breathed new life into the system.