Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB SSD Review

It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.

Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. We also included a standard £60 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.

If ever you needed a reason to contemplate an SSD it is for the overall responsiveness of the Windows experience, from installation, boot and general application performance. The figures above speak for themselves, a massive time saving with a fully loaded system.

Snow Leopard 10.6.4 Boot Times

Not everyone uses Windows 7, and although TRIM is only supported by this Operating system, I like to expand results a little when possible. I therefore used my Macintosh MacBook pro 17 inch, Generation 5.1 which is based around a 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 9600m graphics. There is 8GB of DDR3 ram in this machine with a full 3 Gigabit link speed over the nVidia MCP79 AHCI. I also enabled the full 64bit Kernel and Extensions – if you want to read more, check out this article.

While OSX has yet to get fully fledged support for TRIM, the differences between a high quality SSD like this Kingston V100 and a standard mechanical 2.5inch is incredible. From 52 seconds to 17 seconds shows the gains you can receive with a simple drive change over. You don't need to pay Apple £400 for the pleasure either.

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