Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB SSD Review

Capacity, Final Thoughts & Conclusions

With 128GB physically on board the Kingston V100, in terms of true capacity in conversion from bytes, the user is left with 119GB to do with as they wish. This is more than ample for an OS installation and a handful of large apps with plenty of room to spare.

While the V100 isn’t the fastest drive to come across our test bench, performance is relatively consistent and we had no complaints on its performance while using an instance of Windows 7 Ultimate. Synthetic benchmarks can be indicative of performance extremes but a hands on, real world test drive really tells the story. No stuttering was encountered for which we likely have the onboard 64MB of cache to thank. The idle garbage collection seemed to do an excellent job of keeping things running at speed, even after some extended I/O abuse. This makes it a good candidate for platforms that do not support the TRIM function like Mac OS X and Windows XP.

Pumping out speeds of up to 250MB/s reads and 230MB/s writes, the V100 is certainly no slouch. At $240 for the drive and included accessories, it’s a good value as well with the price per usable gigabyte falling around the $2.00 mark. This is pretty much the sweet spot price per usable gigabyte at the moment for SSDs. Tack on Kingston’s three year warranty and excellent 24/7 support to bolster the value.

Taking all of this into consideration, it’s easy to see why this is one of the best selling drives Kingston offers. It debuted in November 2010 and is still going strong. With that, it’ll be interesting to see what Kingston has in store for 2011 with new controllers coming out as this is being written and smaller architecture NAND emerging in the latest hardware.

Legit Bottom Line: The Kingston SSD Now V100 offers solid performance at a competitive price and should be on the short list of SSDs to buy. With its included bundle and Kingston’s 24/7 support, it continues to be the bread and butter of their SSDNow lineup.