Kingston SSDNow V+

Posted 04/27/2010 at 1:39pm | by Nathan Edwards

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No, we haven't already reviewed this one

It seemed like déjà vu to us, too—didn’t we review a Kingston SSDNow V+ as recently as December? Turns out we’re not crazy (at least in this respect); that was the first-generation SSDNow V+, built on the same Samsung controller as the Corsair P256. The second-gen SSDNow V+, by contrast, uses Toshiba’s T6UG1XBG SSD controller, which features TRIM support (for clearing deleted blocks) and has theoretical maximum reads and writes of 230MB/s and 180MB/s, respectively.

On the outside, the SSDNow V+ looks, well, like every other SSD out there. Unlike most of them, however, the second-gen SSDNow V+ comes as a Performance Upgrade Kit, which includes Acronis-based drive-cloning software, a USB external enclosure, a SATA cable, and adapter rails for 3.5-inch hard drive bays. Sure, you can get all of those things elsewhere, but it’s a thoughtful kit for the upgrader.

Kingston's second-gen SSDNow V+ is upgrade friendly--it comes with an external USB enclosure, cloning software, cables, and 3.5-inch adapter rails.

Toshiba’s controller, like the Indilinx Barefoot controller that powers the Patriot Torqx, contains 128MB DDR DRAM cache to eliminate jitters, and we didn’t experience any during testing. In our h2benchw tests, the SSDNow V+ achieved average sustained read speeds greater than 180MB/s, and average sustained writes of 175.3MB/s, with burst reads up to 223MB/s—close to the claimed maximum. The 128GB Patriot Torqx, by contrast, got 167.6MB/s reads and 164.4MB/s sustained writes. The Torqx still triumphs in random-access times, though—the Kingston’s random reads averaged .28ms to the Torqx’s .11ms, while average random writes took .4ms, to the .3ms random writes offered by the Torqx. Of course, differences in the tens of milliseconds won’t be noticeable to the average user. PCMark Vantage scores and Premiere Pro encoding times were similar to those of the Torqx.

Astute readers will note that these scores aren’t the same as previously given for the Torqx—we’ve recently upgraded our SSD test station and re-tested the Torqx under the same conditions as the Kingston drive. We’ve also moved to Windows 7 for all of our benchmarks, which tends to give slightly lower sustained speeds in our benchmarks than does Windows XP.

The second-gen Kingston SSDNow V+ is a strong performer and it gets brownie points for the included upgrade kit, as well as native TRIM support. It doesn’t offer a huge jump in performance, but users won’t be disappointed. And it’s less expensive than many other 128GB SSDs with similar performance.

Kingston SSDNow V+

King Geedorah

TRIM support; fast reads and writes; included upgrade and connectivity kit; competitive pricing.

King Koopa

Not world-changing; random-access times lag behind Indilinx and Intel controllers.

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