Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. The Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalMark5. HD Tach Ver 3.0.4.06. ATTO Disk Benchmark7. PCMARK Vantage8. Real World Testing9. Closing Thoughts10. View All Pages

Today's market is saturated with SSD drives and it is difficult to know which drive to buy. No one wants to pay over the odds for something they don't need, yet we all want to make sure the performance is up to stratch. This is how Kingston are marketing their SSDNOW V100 series, with fantastic levels of performance at the lowest possible prices.

The Kingston V100 series of solid state drives are available in three sizes, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. All drives have a 3 year warranty with 24/7 technical support. The 128GB model costs £198 inc vat and can be bought in ‘notebook upgrade kit' packs which offer an external chassis, cabling and DVD with Acronis True Image for easy drive mirroring. Kingston only charge £207 inc vat for this additional bundle … £9 extra certainly seems like a great deal.

SPECIFICATIONS

• Form factor — 2.5″
• Interface — SATA 1.5 Gb/sec. and 3.0 Gb/sec.
• Capacities — 64GB, 128GB, 256GB
• Dimensions — 69.85mm x 100mm x 9.5mm
• Weight — 78 grams
• Storage Temperatures — -40°C to 85°C
• Operating Temperatures — 0°C to 70°C
• Vibration Operating — 2.17G
• Vibration Non-Operation — 20G
• 256GB – 250MB/sec. read
• 128GB – 250MB/sec. read
• 64GB – 250MB/sec. read
• 256GB – 230MB/sec write
• 128GB – 230MB/sec write
• 64GB – 145MB/sec write
• Power Specs — 6.4 W (TYP) Active / 1.0W (TYP) Idle
• MTBF — 1,000,000 Hrs

The Kingston SSDNow V100 arrives in a striking purple accented box which highlights an image of the product on the front, as well as specifications on performance below. This particular model is rated at 250MB/s read and 230 MB/s write.

We received the Notebook upgrade bundle which includes the external USB 2.0 chassis and cable, Acronis True Image bootable DVD and literature. You can save £9 and get the drive on its own if you don't need any of these extras.

The external chassis deserves a special mention as it is a very neat little unit which offers USB 2.0 connectivity. By using Acronis you can mirror your current operating system drive across to the SSD without having to reinstall anything. A very welcome addition. You can also remove your current drive, plug it into the chassis then install the new SSD and boot from the DVD to mirror the OS across.

The Kingston SSD chassis is a metal coloured finish which looks great. There is a security sticker on the front, so removing the chassis will void your warranty. That is why we are here however, so you can see inside and hang onto your warranty.

This SSD utilises the Toshiba JMF618 controller which was designed in cooperation with JMicron. This is a new update to the JMF612 controller which means Kingston can offer a 256GB version of this drive to the consumer (using 32nm NAND). We can see 18 NAND flash memory chips which offer 8GB each. There is a Mira branded cache which also offers 64MB of memory to aid throughput.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4 which you can get yourself over here. We try to use free programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB SSD

CPU: Intel Core i7 875k @ 4.2ghz
Cooler: Noctua NH 14D
Motherboard: Intel DP55WG
Hard Drive: Western Digital 1TB
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 1600mhz (4gb)
Sata Interface: Highpoint RocketRAID 620 SATA Controller
PSU: Corsair AX1200W
Graphics: Zotac GTX465
Chassis: Silverstone Raven 2
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: Ilyama ProLite E2472HDD

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
HD Tach
CrystalMark
PCMark Vantage (x64 HDD Suite)

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration. Median averages were extrapolated from the results – this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD's. We are using V3.0 x64.

A fantastic set of results for the controller. 4k random write performance is also much better than previous incarnations. So far this is looking impressive.

I have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

The controller again is delivering high levels of performance according to the HD Tach test results. We recorded a 223.5MB/s average read rate with bursts of just over 256 MB/S. Excellent results.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Write and read speeds are very consistent across the range of testing and although ATTO can sometimes underrate a product, this is a promising set of results.

We use Futuremark's PCMark Vantage in many of our system reviews and we felt that it was worth an inclusion in this review. It is still a synthetic suite, but it uses many real world characteristics to try and judge overall performance levels. We are using the 64 bit version of the HDD Suite for this testing. We also compare against a Samsung F1 1TB drive on this page.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security. From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

To say that the Kingston SSD annihilated the mechanical drive would be an understatement. The SSD offered a massive performance increase throughout all the testing.

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.

At £200 inc vat, the Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB is clearly one of the best value for money solid state drives on the market. The read and write performance is certainly not lacking and within both a Windows and Macintosh environment the real world gains over a high quality mechanical drive are easily noticeable. Our Macintosh OSX 10.6.4 machine loved this particular drive, with a 17 second boot time and noticeable real world application speed benefits. Adding a high quality SSD to a Macintosh laptop really does feel like a massive upgrade.

While the drive alone is going to be available for £197 inc vat, we think paying the extra £9 for the enclosure, cabling and software is a worthwhile investment, especially if you are swapping out a drive with an operating system already configured.

Availability in the UK right now is fairly limited although we have been informed it should start appearing in many stores shortly. We will keep you updated on this page as that happens. Yoyotech should have stock very soon – monitor this page.

KitGuru says: High levels of performance, combined with a very tempting price point make this drive a winner.

Edit: 19th November, the price is lower than we expected and Dabs have it in stock now for £170 inc vat!

Become a Patron!