Kingston’s HyperX and VNow 200 SSDs turn up the heat on the Hard Disk Drive

Unboxing

Here is the retail box that you would buy with the desktop upgrade kit. As you can see the contents are well-packed for transport safely to your door. Inside the box, the precious contents are well-protected by the soft packing material. The SSD is rather tough anyway and Kingston even had a contest to show how durable they are.

We note the promised tech service and the 3-year warranty are printed right on the box as well as the advantages of the product as this SSD will also be featured in retail brick and mortar stores as well as online.

Here are the contents: the 2.5″ SSD, the SATA data cable, the SATA power cable, the case and the cloning software CD.

Here is the SSD’s other side and we see the standard connections.

As you can see, the physical look and dimensions of both SSDs are the same and our SSDs all have the standard SATA power and data connectors.

The stand-alone Kingston Vnow 200 SSD is packaged quite differently as it comes in a plastic clamshell that is cut open with scissors. There is no cloning software nor any cables nor connectors included. The drive comes in a 7mm thickness for more installation choices like the one we received, or else in the standard 9.5mm thickness.

Our Vnow 200 standalone package includes instructions and an adhesive adapter to allow you to mount your new 7mm Kingston SSD in a 9.5mm drive bay so that it does not slip around.  Comparing all 3 SSDs, it is easy to see that our VNow 200 128GB model is thinner. It is available in a 7mm or 9mm thickness.

Below is Thermaltake’s BlackXduet USB and eSATA hard drive dock which proved very useful in reading data from internal drives that are now accessed as external drives. Check out the review published by Leon Hyman. We also use find the built-in USB 3.0 docks on the top of our Thermaltake Chaser MK-I and Overseer RX-I are also extremely useful for transferring data quickly.

We set up Windows 7 64-bit on one of our Seagate 500GB 7200.12 Barracuda hard drives along with two or three games, favorite applications and benching tools. We put about 100GB or so of data on our HDD so that we would not have any issues cloning the HDD to our 3 SSDs, the one with the smallest capacity being 128GB. We made sure to leave room for additional files and applications to its maximum of about 119GB.

We used the supplied Acronis cloning software on the Kingston-supplied CD to make a exact copy of our HDD to all three SSDs (individually, each in under a half-hour), and we were able to then boot from any of the now identically cloned drives. The Acronis cloning software is very fast and very easy to use. However, before we get to the benching, let’s recap the SSD and what makes it unique from mechanical drives.

One mistake many enthusiasts make is to think of a SSD like a mechanical HDD. Instead, think of it as a giant flash drive with the strengths and weaknesses inherent to that kind of storage. MrK’s article on the previous series of Kingston SSDNow is extraordinarily well-written and detailed, and it would be good to review it if you are not familar with Solid-State storage. Also, here is his article on the faster but much more expensive Patriot TorqX 256 GB SSD which goes into even more detail. MrK explains the strengths and weaknesses of the SSD. Instead of repeating his information, this section will be the briefiest of recaps and we will focus instead on secure erase and performance degradation.

Because of the way data is written to and erased from a SSD, the write speeds will go down as more and more data is written to it. There is a definite need for TRIM and other garbage collection. When Windows 7 identifies the drive as a SSD, it enables the TRIM command for the drive when files are deleted from it. The TRIM command tells the SSD controller to delete the pages on the NAND flash block when the user deletes the data. The entire block containing the data is copied into the memory cache and then the block is erased. After this procedure, the data without the user-deleted part is rewritten back to the block from the memory cache. This results in longer delete times, but allows the write performance to remain nearly like-new.

Secure Erase and Performance Degradation

A secure erase restores your drive to a like-new state where each cell is effectively zeroed out. So its performance would be like-new also as if it was fresh out of the box. Simply cloning over from an HDD to SSD would not zero out the cells like a secure erase would. This is because you’re not guaranteed to be writing over the same cells. In a clone, information is just being transferred over, not like erasing a cell first and then writing to it. On a good SSD such as Kingston’s SSDNow v200 or HyperX series, there is simply no need to secure erase periodically, but whenever you format or re-image your drive, it’s a great idea.

This is perhaps the most detailed yet simplified step-by-step way to secure erase your SSD – something you must do (for safety) if you ever sell it.  Be aware that your SSD’s BIOS may have some sort of mechanism that prevents the secure erase tool from detecting the SSD for secure erase. We had no such issues with any of our Kingston drives.

Note on testing.

We began our testing with our SSD long after it was in a brand-new state as delivered by Kingston. We also began with one well-used Seagate 500GB HDD which is the 12th generation of their 7200 rpm desktop series. We installed Windows 7 64-bit operating system and a bit less than 80 GB of programs, applications and games. Next, we used the Acronis Cloning software included on the included Kingston CD to effortlessly copy in just a few minutes the entire hard drive image to the Kingston SSD which now became a bootable drive.

We repeated this two more times to have identical images across all 4 drives. Generally, all of our testing was done with the SSD in a used condition and the drive was not erased (as many benchers do) before each bench that is run or after a single day of normal day-to-day use.

Although we have evaluation copies of some of the SW we tested, generally we used the freeware or shareware version if there was a choice. There are some remarkable tools available for testing hard disk and solid-state drive performance and all of the ones that we used are considered excellent.

Let’s check out our test bed.