Kingston SSDNow 100V review

Consumer SSDs haven’t been around for long, but they’re quickly becoming affordable. They’re still nowhere near traditional platter-based disks when it comes to value, but prices have definitely been moving in the right direction for the past year or two.

Take Kingston’s new SSDNow drive. The V designation marks this out as a “value” drive, and it serves up 128GB of storage for £144 exc VAT, or £1.21 per gigabyte. That’s less than the £1.42 per gigabyte Crucial demands for the 128GB version of its superb M225, and less than Kingston’s own SSDNow V+, which now costs £1.48 per gigabyte.

This particular model comes with a case to create your own portable hard disk using USB 2, but buying the drive without this or the same-priced desktop PC upgrade kit – which includes a 3.5in bay mounting bracket and SATA cable – will save you around £8 exc VAT.

Despite the price, the Kingston gave an excellent performance in our synthetic large file tests, run in benchmarking tool AS SSD. With read and write speeds of 239MB/sec and 226MB/sec respectively, the SSDNow 100V pushes the limits of its SATA/300 interface. Overall, the 100V far outpaced the Crucial M225, which managed 219MB/sec and 158MB/sec respectively. The Kingston continued to impress in other demanding AS SSD benchmarks, too, writing multi-threaded small files at 21MB/sec to the Crucial’s 13MB/sec.

Results were impressive in some of our real-world tests as well: large file read and write speeds of 187MB/sec and 274MB/sec indicate that bulky files can be moved in short order compared to the 138MB/sec and 208MB/sec speeds of the A-Listed Samsung Spinpoint F3 mechanical disk. There’s TRIM support too, to avoid the slow-down that can affect older SSDs as they fill up.

The SSDNow faltered in some of our real-world small file tests, though. Its single 4k file read speed of 12MB/sec paled in comparison to the Crucial’s 68MB/sec, which indicates that the Kingston is slower when handling the types of small file operations that Windows often uses. It failed to impress in our theoretical small file tests, too, with its read and write speeds of 83MB/sec and 106MB/sec broadly similar to what we’ve seen from the Samsung hard disk.

Nonetheless, it’s impressive to see a “value” SSD streaking ahead of even the fastest models we’ve tested, and its low cost per gigabyte makes it a great choice. It’s still the case that not many computing tasks are disk-bound, so you can expect to enjoy better responsiveness rather than real productivity. All the same, in this fast-developing market the Kingston is our new favourite.

Author: Mike Jennings