Kingston SSDNow V Series 128GB 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 128GB MLC Solid State Drive is an entry level SSD and the performance results clearly show that. Rather than seeing some nice flat performance numbers across the drive we are seeing some performance spikes that you can clearly see in the benchmark results above. This benchmark was done on the brand new drive, so performance degradation is not an issue here. The drive averages 106.3MB/s read and 44.4MB/s write. The burst speed of this drive was a lower than expected at 125.4MB/s.

Comparison Chart: When comparing the Kingston SSDNow V Series 128GB SSD to other popular 2.5″ notebook hard drives you can see that it scored decently compared the 11 other drives that we have benchmarked on the same test system with the Intel ICH10R south bridge. With an average write speed of 44.4MB/s it finishes second to last with only the Super Talent MasterDrive OX 64GB MLC SSD being slower. Both the Super Talent OX and the Kingston V series use the JMicron controller, so these results were expected. The burst speed was the lowest of all 12 SSDs and hard drives that have been benchmarked to date. It should also be pointed out that the Kingston SSDNow has a slighter higher random access speed than all but one of the other SSDs as well. 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.