Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB SSD Review


Although Solid State Drives still belong to a more or less enthusiast sector, I can very easily see them becoming the standard in in the next couple of years. With increased performance, storage and reliability and lower price tags, the SSD gives a much needed shot in the arm to the slowest component of your PC- the Hard Drive.

Today, we take a look at the Kingston SSDNow V+ Series drive with a 128GB capacity. Packaged in a nice little box, Kingston makes sure that you are provided all the tools you would need to get you up and running. Starting off, since this is a 2.5” drive, you are provided with brackets to install it in your 3.5” desktop bay if you need too. Also included is a USB enclosure along with a full version of Acronis drive imaging application that can basically mirror your existing drive to the SSD so you don’t have to worry about losing any applications or data to upgrade.

The drive has a SATA 2.0 Interface which is good enough to sustain its data transfer rates, however, we feel that SATA3 or 6GB/s sec interface would be ideal for SSD drives moving forward- especially if you want to combine a couple of them in RAID0.

As you can see, the V+ is amongst the fastest drives we’ve tested with a constant throughput of 220 MB/s- matching the mighty Intel X25. The following are the rest of the results from HDTach comparing the Kingston to some of the other SSDs we’ve recently review

As you can see, the Kingston is pretty much identical to the Intel X25 which is the fastest SSD that we’ve tested. It also has an incredibly low Random Access time at just 0.1s that makes your computer react to things almost instantly.

About the only downside to this drive is the price which is currently at US$370 or AED 1350/- which makes it quite an expensive component. If you can get past that, then you;re looking at one of the fastest SSD drives which not only makes Windows boot fast but also launches your applications almost instantly.

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