Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB

I'm very happy with my SSD, but decided to backcheck on some stuff with Kingston. We all know SSD´s degrade performance when pages inside the device are full so it won´t stay 100% always, though it always outperform any HDD.

The Kingston website form required a part number which i didn´t have at hand (its inside the case, afterall) so i got a nice email from Kingston support asking if i had questions. Here was the questions i asked with the answers i received:

Hello Barry,

I consulted engineering regarding your questions on our V series SSD drive.  Their answers are below.

Q1) Does Kingston offer a utility to restore my drive to its newstate?
It is known formating a SSD, or deleting its files or partitions won't restore advertised / new-state performance.

Answer: No, Kingston at this time does not offer a SSD cleaning tool. However, you can use diskpart from command line (cmd) in Vista or Windows 7 to clean the disk. This will wipe the entire disk and all data. 

Q2) Because Q1 is only Will there be a firmware update to support TRIM command found in Windows 7 and later in Linux?

Answer: There will not be a firmware update available for the V series SSD's to support TRIM.

Q3) What firmware updates are in the pipeline?

Answer: For the current V series, none.

Q4) What exactly is it that makes this disk better than any other without the Toshiba chip?

Answer: The controller used on the drive. The controller on any SSD is the key to how well it performs.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to reply to this e-mail with full email history. Thank you for using Kingston on-line technical support.

Regards,

Matthew Eaton
Kingston Technology
Technical Support

If they don't offer TRIM support in the future, this SSD is doomed. Well ok not that bad really, but its not what i expected. So i'd say don't buy this Kingston SSD, for answer #1 alone. The fact that they don't clarify "what" makes the drive better as its their primary sales argument doesn't make things better.

I want to check out the Intel utility though, so if anyone could pass me the HDDErase tool they bundle with their solid state disks its much appreciated!

Update 20091101: Intel released a firmware update for its SSD line, now suppors TRIM and improved random access speed. Due to it bricking some SSDs' they've withdrawn, but that'll be a matter of time.