Kingston 80GB SSDNow M Series Drive 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 SNM125-S2/80GB has very fast read speeds, but the write speed leaves a little more room for improvement. The Kingston SNM125-S2/80GB is one of the fastest Solid State Drive (SSD) models that we have looked at when it comes to read seed. The SNM125-S2/80GB averages 219.8MB/s read and 80.2MB/s write and a burst speed of 258.9MB/s.

Comparison Chart: To give you an idea of how this drive stacks up in the big picture, LR compared the Kingston SNM125-S2/80GB SSD to seven other drives to see how it does against other popular 2.5″ notebook hard drives. The Kingston SNM125-S2/80GB performed slightly faster than the OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD on the average read test, but the OCZ Vertex 120GB and Corsair P256 SSD were both more than twice as fast on the average write test. The OCZ Vertex, Corsair P256 and the Kingston SSDNow M 80GB all had Random Access test scores of just 0.1ms. 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.