Daily Reviews Summary 04/17/12

No HDD to SSD upgrade could be simpler than one made with a Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB Upgrade Kit. The Kingston SSDNow V+200 Upgrade Kit includes everything required for a simple, seamless upgrade, with very little technical knowledge required. At the heart of the kit is the 90GB SSDNow V+200 SSD, featuring the SandForce SF-2281 controller sporting 535MB/s read and 280 MB/s write speeds. Since the V+200 is a business class 2.5" drive, it is every bit at home in a laptop or desktop, and even includes overprovisioning for increased longevity and reliability.

In my opinion, the water block included with this kit is the weakest link. I wish I had a nice LGA 1155 block that I could slap in the kit and see the performance difference, but I've been out of the water cooling game for two generations now. Compared to all-in-one units, the pump is much larger, and having a reservoir is a passive way to remove heat from the water. Aside from these limiting factors, I am afraid of the single, 3-pin connector powering the entire unit. I can't say for sure that the power source was the cause, but I did have some strange issues with hang-ups and other problems shortly after beginning the testing for the Bigwater 760 Plus while running it off of the 3-pin connector. After being scared by the 3-pin connector, I found a 3-pin to 4-pin Molex adapter and finished the remainder of the tests with that configuration. I couldn't recreate the issue.

Although solid state drives have generated the lion's share of buzz in the storage space these last few years, traditional hard drives with spinning media continue to be a mainstay of the industry and have evolved to offer higher capacities and more performance than ever before. Of course, even the fastest of today's hard drives can't compete with solid state drives in terms of peak transfer speeds and especially access times, but the release of the new WD VelociRaptor we'll be showing you here today helps close the gap just a bit..