Consumer SSDs, while still nowhere near traditional platter-based hard disks when it comes to value, are starting to become affordable.
Take Kingston’s new SSDNow drive. The V designation marks this out as a “value” drive, and it serves up 128GB of storage for $277, which works out at $2.16 per gigabyte.
Despite the price, the Kingston gave an excellent performance in our synthetic large-file tests, run in benchmarking tool AS SSD. With read and write speeds of 239MB/sec and 226MB/sec respectively, the SSDNow V100 pushes the limits of its SATA/300 interface. It isn’t as fast as our favourite high end SSD, the OCZ RevoDrive, but it is on par with other SATA based SSDs. The Kingston impressed in other benchmarks, too, writing multithreaded small files at 21MB/sec.
Results were good in our real-world tests as well: large-file read and write speeds of 187MB/sec easily outstrip the 138MB/sec and 208MB/sec speeds of the A-Listed Samsung SpinPoint F3 mechanical disk (which won our last HDD labs). There’s TRIM support to avoid the slow-down that can affect older SSDs.
The SSDNow faltered in a few of our real-world small-file tests, though. Its single 4k file read speed of 12MB/sec paled in comparison to SSDs using Sandforce controllers (this drive uses the same JMicron JMF618 controller used in the Macbook Airs), proving the Kingston is slower when handling the types of small-file operations that Windows often uses. It failed to impress in synthetic small-file tests, too, with its read and write speeds of 83MB/sec and 106MB/sec similar to those from the Samsung hard disk.
Nonetheless, it’s impressive to see a “value” SSD competitive with the fastest models we’ve tested, and its low cost per gigabyte makes the SSDNow V100 a great choice.
