Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSD Review

HD Tach v3.0.4.0

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.

Benchmark Results: The Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive is only rated to have a sequential read of 170MB/s, but you can see that that rating is very conservative. We were able to reach an average read speed of 231.5MB/s, which is the fastest read speed we have ever seen on an SSD. The average write speed on the SSD was only 43.5MB/s, which is due to the fact that the drive has just five MLC Flash chips and isn’t using all the controller’s channels. This is very interesting! This benchmark was done on the brand new drive, so performance degradation is not an issue here and this is as good as it gets.

Comparison Chart: The Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive has the fastest read speed we have ever seen, but it also had the lowest write speed ever seen on an SSD. The burst speed was awesome, which is expected on Intel based drives. The results of HD Tach’s CPU utilization test don’t mean much as the application has a +/- 2% margin of error and the results of the benchmark range between 0-3%, which doesn’t represent a significant difference.