Kingston SSDnow V series 64GB

With the SSDnow V-series, Kingston is one of the first to make SSDs accessible to all. This explains the popularity of the drive with those who want to optimise performance on an old laptop with a sluggish hard drive. It comes in 30, 64 and 128 GB versions. We tested the 64 GB version.

Like the others it uses a Toshiba controller but note that Kingston announces higher performances for the higher capacity drives. The performances for the 128 GB versions will therefore be slightly up on the 64 GB version which will in turn be better than those for the 30 GB version. Note also that the Toshiba controller is in fact a JMicron JMF602 that Toshiba has modified to improve performance.
Those looking for high performance should opt for one of Kingston's other series: V+, M, or E... or even another brand.


Pure performance

First we use CrystalDiskMark to give us an idea of the drive's performance:


While performance levels are ok for reads, write speeds fall off as soon as you start dealing with 512 KB or less files.

The basic IOmeter tests generally support the analysis drawn from the first set of results:


Speeds in IOmeter give additional information to that obtained with CrystalDiskMark in terms of random writes of 2 MB files for which speeds are in the upper half for SSDs.

The average and maximum access times were measured for random reads and writes of small 4 KB files in IOmeter:


The results are quite average as far as SSDs go but pulverise those for standard hard drives. This reading alone is enough to justify investing in an SSD as your system disk to accelerate startup of your computer and its general use.

We also use Iometer to simulate use in four different working environments: database, file server, web server and workstation. We add to these a read and write test of small 4 KB files. The results are given in IO/s (inputs-outputs per second):


Once again, though not the best in terms of SSDs, the V series 64 GB offers good performance levels in environments which require numerous operations. It even beats the WD VelociRaptor 150 GB hard drive.


Performance in practice

These performances were measured with PCMark Vantage. They have been evaluated with an overall score and scores for each usage (Windows, Defender, gaming, Windows Vista startup and so on) :


To continue with the comparison with the WD VelociRaptor 150 GB, performances here are twice as good. They are however not as good as highend SSDs such as the OCZ Agility 120 GB.


Performance consistency

After 15 minutes of intensive writing of small random files, we took a reading of write performance levels once again, using the same protocol as in the "pure performance" section. The idea is to see if there's a drop in speed, and in what proportion:


The loss in efficiency is well contained in sequential writes for large files but things are a good deal worse with random writes for large or small files. Speeds can be divided by 5 and 25 respectively. Best to use some TRIM support software if you don't have an operating system (like Windows 7) which supports TRIM natively.