Kanguru 100 256GB SSD $199.95 FS

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PanzerBoxb

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Ripped from dealnews:

Buy.com has the Kanguru 100 256GB SSD for $199.95. It was listed as 6Gbps but it is only SATA 2 and the specs only show 230MB/s read and 200MB/s write. The unit is synchronous MLC and lists a 3 year warranty. Shipping is free but 2-day is only $5.

Vendor Link

There are no firmware updates nor reviews for this that I could find.
 
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I wish I could find some information on this SSD. This is the price that I said I would buy at for a 256GB drive, but I don't want to thow my money away on a bad brive. If anyone knows more about these drives, please post.
 
My amateur guess is that these are rebadged Kingston SSDNow drives. I'm basing this guess on the scientific analysis of the name, both use "100" in the name of the drive. :cool:
 
For the price I am willing to give it a shot. You can tell everyone is gun shy about the brand because it is still in stock. If this had been any name brand it would be gone by now.
 
well there website says there a US company.. Thats a bonus I guess.. Maybe a rebadged g1 crucial
 
JRS said:
My amateur guess is that these are rebadged Kingston SSDNow drives. I'm basing this guess on the scientific analysis of the name, both use "100" in the name of the drive. :cool:
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Specs for this drive are comparable to the Kingston SSDNow drives so you probably have found the match. If I was in the market for a 256GB SSD I'd pull the trigger since this is about 1/2 the cost of what the current gen goes for. It has a 3 year warranty and despite all of our ignorance to the company's products, they seem to have been around for a while.
 
Slow SSD > (by far) any hdd.
Medium-speed SSD > (barely) slow SSD
High-speed SSD > (unnoticeable amount even in the most strenuous situations) medium-speed SSD

Buy accordingly ;). Slow SSD with low price for the win.
 
It's not even the R/W speeds, but the access time that will allow even the low end SSDs to blow an HDD out of the water.
 
weuntouchable said:
Specs for this drive are comparable to the Kingston SSDNow drives so you probably have found the match. If I was in the market for a 256GB SSD I'd pull the trigger since this is about 1/2 the cost of what the current gen goes for. It has a 3 year warranty and despite all of our ignorance to the company's products, they seem to have been around for a while.
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A 256GB SSD from Samsung or Crucial (M4) goes for $290-310. I would pass on this and consider resale value of one of these Kanguru's vs a more popular drive.
 
JohnleMVP said:
A 256GB SSD from Samsung or Crucial (M4) goes for $290-310. I would pass on this and consider resale value of one of these Kanguru's vs a more popular drive.
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$100 of savings now > $10 extra selling price for a name brand drive 2 years from now. If you prefer to pay a 50% premium now for the extra speed or reliability of another drive I can buy that, but I can't buy paying more now in the hopes that you will recoup more later because there is no way you will get anywhere close to $100 more on a used drive with similar capacity down the road. Unless these drives self destruct in two years. If that happens I retract my comments.
 
weuntouchable said:
$100 of savings now > $10 extra selling price for a name brand drive 2 years from now. If you prefer to pay a 50% premium now for the extra speed or reliability of another drive I can buy that, but I can't buy paying more now in the hopes that you will recoup more later because there is no way you will get anywhere close to $100 more on a used drive with similar capacity down the road. Unless these drives self destruct in two years. If that happens I retract my comments.
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Like you said the $300 drive is faster (230MB/s vs 490MB/s), a generation newer (Sata 2 vs Sata 3) and most likely has a better warranty/reliability (Little Kanguru vs Giants Samsung\Crucial). So I think the price difference in resale value will be a lot more than $10. As people might actually search for Crucial M4 on ebay or wherever.

So how much are you really saving by buying the unknown generation old drive now? Will you even want to keep it for 2 years?
 
JohnleMVP said:
Like you said the $300 drive is faster (230MB/s vs 490MB/s), a generation newer (Sata 2 vs Sata 3) and most likely has a better warranty/reliability (Little Kanguru vs Giants Samsung\Crucial). So I think the price difference in resale value will be a lot more than $10. As people might actually search for Crucial M4 on ebay or wherever.

So how much are you really saving by buying the unknown generation old drive now? Will you even want to keep it for 2 years?
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I Got my 1st SSD well under 2 years ago. Since then I have changed SSD's 6 times in my main rig alone.. Only once for a defect.. As an Enthusiast I do not anticipate anything in my system being here in 2 years anyway.. Also as SSD prices fall in 2 years this will be worth 25 bucks & a M4 will probably be worth 30.. Its the nature of technology as a whole & is especially the case with newer technology.. Hell in 2 years I anticipate being able to buy a 1tb ssd for less then 200.
 
Over the years my dad preached to me about spending the premium on larger purchases, because with a cheap item you will probably be buying another anyway. I got burned too many times trying to be cheap.

I finally took the SSD plunge last week. Bought a Samsung 830 128 GB for my MBP and a 256 GB for my desktop. Hopefully this one also pays off with reliability and speed.
 
I guess I'm going to give this a try. The speeds will be good for me, I just hope the controller doesn't have a lot of failures like OCZ SSD's.

Now I'm back on the fence again!
 
bastage said:
Hell in 2 years I anticipate being able to buy a 1tb ssd for less then 200.
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A snowball's chance in hell of this happening. Over the last two years SSD prices have barely moved. I know because it's hard to forget the talk over the last few years of everyone being excited by brand name hitting $1 a gb... and that still being the talk now. For a realistic estimate I'd say best case scenario is major brand 256gb such as crucial at $200 in 2 years.
 
PhantmShado said:
A snowball's chance in hell of this happening. Over the last two years SSD prices have barely moved. I know because it's hard to forget the talk over the last few years of everyone being excited by brand name hitting $1 a gb... and that still being the talk now. For a realistic estimate I'd say best case scenario is major brand 256gb such as crucial at $200 in 2 years.
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With recent sales that ain't going to hold. m4's are approaching a buck a GB on an almost weekly basis. My 1st ssd less then 2 years ago was over 2 bucks a gb.
 
bastage said:
With recent sales that ain't going to hold. m4's are approaching a buck a GB on an almost weekly basis. My 1st ssd less then 2 years ago was over 2 bucks a gb.
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NAND doesn't play by any of the hardware rules and is used in some many different devices (SSDs, smartphones, cameras, etc) that its impossible to predict if it will bottom out like hard drives and memory did or if it will remain high due to the huge demand. NAND demand is expected to skyrocket over the next couple of years, so those waiting to see SSD prices hit mechanical drive prices will probably have quite a long wait. I would say we don't hit $.50/GB for at least 3 years.
 
weuntouchable said:
NAND doesn't play by any of the hardware rules and is used in some many different devices (SSDs, smartphones, cameras, etc) that its impossible to predict if it will bottom out like hard drives and memory did or if it will remain high due to the huge demand. NAND demand is expected to skyrocket over the next couple of years, so those waiting to see SSD prices hit mechanical drive prices will probably have quite a long wait. I would say we don't hit $.50/GB for at least 3 years.
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$0.42 per GB this week.. Granted its AR & not a top tier drive.. But fact is with SSD's Top tier doesn't feel any faster then 2nd tier. So unless your running benchmarks all day then the cost per GB is going to be more important then the speed anyway. And if SSD manufacturers want to keep selling drives then the cost per GB is going to have to keep dropping fast.
 
bastage said:
$0.42 per GB this week.. Granted its AR & not a top tier drive.. But fact is with SSD's Top tier doesn't feel any faster then 2nd tier. So unless your running benchmarks all day then the cost per GB is going to be more important then the speed anyway. And if SSD manufacturers want to keep selling drives then the cost per GB is going to have to keep dropping fast.
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That is one example, I even got in on it and they shipped. But I still have a feeling it was a price mistake. Before it disappeared they raised it to $150 3 hours after the thread was started.
 
cHaOserveR said:
That is one example, I even got in on it and they shipped. But I still have a feeling it was a price mistake. Before it disappeared they raised it to $150 3 hours after the thread was started.
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Actually no they didn't.. Buy.com like amazon sells the same product from multiple sellers.. ANTonline was the original seller & when the price went up it was them running out of stock & it moving on to the next seller.

Price mistake is still possible, but as fast & hard as that had to of been slammed they sure didnt catch it very fast if it was.
 
Code:
Buy.com itself has limited stock of this drive at the same price. Here are the results I got from it on an Atom D410 system:

Code: 
Seq:      223.9/217.0
512K:     149.3/178.7
4K:       10.96/20.89
4K/QD32:  11.03/23.25

The drive had a fresh install of Windows 7 x64 with nothing added except some patches. Going from a spindle 2.5" 7200 rpm drive to this made a world of difference from the general user interface perspective. Reliability and longevity have yet to be determined, of course.

EDIT: Here are the results running on an i7-2600K system.

Code: 
Seq:      259.1/240.7
512K:     152.3/139.4
4K:       10.85/31.70
4K/QD32:  80.01/21.83
 
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Here's a couple articles from the past on the Kingston Now v100, both from about 1.5 yrs ago (Nov 2010).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow-v-plus-100-review
http://.com/our-reviews/kingston-ssdnow-v100-128b-ssd-review/

From the 2nd link
Toshiba JMF618 controller which is a rebadged version of the JMF612 and designed in cooperation with JMicron
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Of course that is only relevant if these are the same drive. Even if they aren't, they are the same class of drive which makes this interesting, again from the 2nd link:
...3 capacities ranging from 64GB to 256GB and are recommended pricing is $119.99, 224.99 and 489.99.
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For comparison, two of my first three SSD purchases last spring were each $200, at $1.2/GB a 160GBAdata rebadged Intel 2nd gen x25m, and at $.78/GB a 256GB Western Digital Blue. So there's been movement, but nothing like traditional hard drives prior to the flood last fall where for the previous three years it seemed you could basically double your hard drive size each year for the same price. This tells me that SSDs are still not mainstream enough and the technology still too new to see frequent drops in the everyday price, but there is definitely much more movement now than a year ago.
 
Consider SSDs a premium performance product, don't expect prices to start matching spinning disks anytime soon, if ever. Outside of the Enterprise, who needs capacity > 256GB with super low latency? If you're a professional doing editing then that's a different story but you would be able to afford a 1TB SSD at $1300 or whatever they cost these days. It will still outperform an array of 15K SAS drives, and be more reliable.

The drive manufactures aren't going to canabalize spinning disk sales with all the money invested in research and production of those drives.

I get excited over 256GB SSDs <=$1/GB, and 2TB 7.2k 32MB cache or greater drives at or near $100. Affordable desktop performance and cheap ass mass storage. I look at it this way, I'm getting way more performance for my dollar with these SSDs than I ever did with any Raptor or Velociraptor drive. Pricing right now is where it should be for these drives. We're getting good value here when you consider what we were getting a few years ago in this segment.
 
I bit in for one. Interested to see how this compares to the mushkins on sale.
 
Yep those ,for me it's not about reviews but real life use. I have one of those cheap ocz petrol drives and although they are rated low you really can't tell a difference compared to more expensive higher end drives.
 
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