Kingston SSDNow V+ Series (2nd Gen) 128GB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB Drive3. Testing Configuration4. Iometer5. Atto Disk Benchmark6. AS SSD7. Operating System boot times8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

SSD's are finally getting a firm grip within the market, helped in part by dropping prices and increasing capacities. If you have been holding off on upgrading then perhaps today we can change your mind. We would go so far as to say that from our experience, adding an SSD as a boot drive to a system is one of the best upgrades you could make.

SSD drives are all based around the controllers with makers such as Intel, Samsung, JMicron and Indilinx leading the way. This makes the drive on test today especially interesting, as it uses a controller from Toshiba.

Kingston are probably best known for their entry level drives which are firmly targeted at mainstream users. They combine decent performance with ultimate value and have proved to be a big seller – Kingston have developed a second generation drive which offers Windows 7 TRIM support and is available in sizes up to 512GB.

On our test bench today is the 128GB version of the drive which should prove to be the most popular, combining a competitive price point (around £250) with decent capacity for a Windows boot OS drive.

Features and Specifications:

Sequential Speed: 230MB/s read and 180MB/s write
Key points: Runs silent and cool with no moving parts
Shock Resistant: no moving mechnical parts means the SSD handles rougher conditions (ideal for portability)
Components: MLC NAND Flash Memory
Interface: Sata 1.5GB/s and 3.0GB/s
Support: Fully S.M.A.R.T. compliant, self monitoring, analysis and reporting technology
Capacity: 64, 128, 256, 512GB
Operating Temperatures: 0c to 70c
Dimensions: 69.85mm x 100mm x 9.5mm
Weight: 84 grams
Vibration operating: 2.17G
Vibration non operating: 20G
Operation shock: 1500G
Power Specifications: 2.6W Active, 0.15W idle
Life expectancy: 1,000,000 hours HTBF

The packaging will be instantly recognisable to many … Kingston are using the same red artistic man's face they have been using since they started.

Inside the box is a full kit to get everyone up and running right away.

There is a 3.5 inch mounting bracket for your chassis. A SSD USB housing case (bonus points awarded), USB cable, Sata Cable and power adapter. There is also a copy of Acronis True Image HD – which is a very capable drive backup software suite.

For those of you counting all the pennies, the drive is sold without all these extras for £10 less. Clearly the bundle we have is much better value, the USB drive caddy alone is worth the price even if you use it with another 2.5″ drive.

The drive itself comes with a three year UK warranty which is pretty much industry standard in 2010. It can withstand operating shocks of 1,500G as well as a continuous operating vibration of 2.5G.

The new Toshiba based SSD Now V+ is a direct replacement of the Samsung based drive which they only released months ago. Looking at our drive we can see we have the newer one because it is listed as SNVP325–S2B. The older drive was SNVP225-S2b. It is worth checking if you are ordering one, however I think by now that all the old stocks would be sold or replaced with the newer model.

Drive reliability has been stated to be around 1,000,000 hours which means well in excess of 110 years if you used it 24/7. Realistically we can assume that the drive should not fail within a standard operating lifetime.

Opening the drive housing was relatively easy and we can see the Toshiba T6UG1XGB drive controller on the PCB as well as a 128mb DDR Micron chip – the 9LA17-D9HSJ with eight 16GB Toshiba NAND flash modules. These are all on one side of the PCB which leaves room on the other side to populate for the 256Gb version. The PCB sits beside a non conductive thermal pad to help with shock vibration protection if handled roughly. The 128mb Micron chip is used as a cache to help random read and write performance.

Trim support will certainly be welcomed as it will help performance to stay at a constant level throughout months of everyday use. Windows 7 is the Operating system of choice for TRIM support so if you haven't yet upgraded, now would be a good time. Incidentally while other operating systems lack TRIM support some of the Indilinx and Samsung drive controllers offer trash collection options which can help with performance, long term.

The Drive Caddy is an attractively designed unit and it features a tool less design …

… Simply pull the lever to the unlocked position and pull on the cover.

The unit opens to reveal a sata-usb converter based chipset.

Slide in the drive, reseal the outer chassis and you are ready to use as a portable USB based storage device. It is a nicely thought out extra and well worth the modest premium.

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.

Test System:
Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB SSD
OCZ Vertex 128GB
Intel X-25M 160GB SSD
Corsair P128 SSD

CPU: Intel Core i7 875k
Cooler: Noctua NH 14D
Motherboard: Intel DP55WG
Hard Drive: Western Digital 1TB
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 1600mhz (4gb)
PSU: Enermax 1250w Revolution
Graphics: Zotac GTX465
Chassis: Silverstone Raven 2
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: LaCie 730 30 inch LED screen

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.

IOMETER

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. Iometer is pronounced “eye-OM-i-ter,” to rhyme with “thermometer.” Iometer does for a computer’s I/O subsystem what a dynamometer does for an engine: it measures performance under a controlled load. Iometer was formerly known as “Galileo.”

Iometer is both a workload generator (that is, it performs I/O operations in order to stress the system) and a measurement tool (that is, it examines and records the performance of its I/O operations and their impact on the system). It can be configured to emulate the disk or network I/O load of any program or benchmark, or can be used to generate entirely synthetic I/O loads. It can generate and measure loads on single or multiple (networked) systems.

Iometer can be used for measurement and characterization of:

• Performance of disk and network controllers.
• Bandwidth and latency capabilities of buses.
• Network throughput to attached drives.
• Shared bus performance.
• System-level hard drive performance.
• System-level network performance.

We were quite surprised (and disappointed) to see relatively weak random performance from the drive when compared with the Intel and OCZ offerings. The Indilinx controller is clearly superior in this regard. Intel's controller is still literally miles ahead. Time to check out the write performance.

Again we were less than impressed with the random write performance of the drive as it is outclassed by both Intel and OCZ drives. We would have expected more from the new controller but clearly there is still some work to be done by Toshiba. We would hope to see a firmware update in the future help resolve these issues.

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.

The Kingston drive puts in a strong showing with the ATTO benchmark and the Toshiba controller delivers a well balanced set of results across both read and write benchmarks.

The AS SSD benchmark is another free utility which was created specifically with SSD's in mind. It delivers a plethora of tests across sequential read and write and also places random read and write loads across a specific area of the drive. This is a good tool to use in conjunction with Windows 7 as it mirrors a very real world set of conditions.

The Kingston drive performed at the top of the field in our AS SSD tests and while the expensive Intel X drive managed a staggering 260MB/s read the Kingston drive was right on the shoulder of the OCZ Vertex. The write performance however shows the Kingston drive leading the pack with 183MB/s – over 20mb/s more than the Indilinx powered Vertex.

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, no programs were installed, just the operating system and a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. The machine was then shut down and once started up we recorded boot times – until we reached a working desktop. We used a digital watch for this 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 £70 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.

Basically we can work out that by adding any of the SSD drives on test today we can reduce our Windows boot time by half. The Kingston drive is top of the pile, just behind the Intel X drive which leads by a considerable margin.

Snow Leopard 10.6.3. 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.

Removing the mechanical drive in this system gave massive real world benefits. Even though the system booted up faster with an SSD, everything was much more responsive.

As we expected, the Intel drive came out top with the Kingston drive in second place with a 4 second deficit. The Corsair and OCZ drives followed a mere second behind. The mechanical drive was nowhere in sight and we found that we could be actually working in Photoshop CS5 with an SSD by the time the Macintosh was just booting into the OS with the 7,200 rpm unit.

If you need a good reason to upgrade to an SSD, we think this is it.

The SSD market is continuing to improve and while it is hardly breaking news, the benefits by adding an SSD drive to your system for OS booting reaps massive rewards. You can halve the time your system takes to boot just by adding one of the drives on test today.

The Kingston V+ Series 128GB drive proved to be a solid performer and while it seemed to have some performance issues with the IOMETER random synthetic read and write tests, this was never really that noticeable under real world conditions. We tested by loading multiple files within Windows and recorded very little differences between other drives. Sequential performance is exceptionally strong.

The drive is competitively priced in the UK, currently around the £250 price point which puts it on a par with other units from makers such as OCZ and Corsair. We particularly liked the bundle, including the cables and USB caddy for external portability.

We can strongly recommend the Kingston SSDNow V+ Series drive, it is one of the best drives we have found for boot times and it delivers a well rounded level of performance while offering a bundle unmatched by any other manufacturer. We feel the OCZ Vertex is the main competitor to this unit and although the Indilinx controller is clearly more mature the Kingston V+ drive is certainly not to be ignored.

KitGuru says: A solid performer and excellent bundle ensure this should be on your shortlist.

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