Kingston SSD Now V Series 128 GB Review

In the last few years, Solid State Drive (SSD) technology has arguably been the most exciting development. This has finally allowed things to get moving fast in the storage industry to try to match the rapid pace of development in other areas of the computer hardware equation. As it stands, SSDs have been victim of high costs per unit and as such are seen as a niche market. As with every new technology before it, the cost per item will go down as the consumer adoption increases.

Last year Kingston sought to put this exciting technology in the hands of more users than ever before. With their SSD Now V series, Kingston launched a new series of SSD lineup that would let entry-level consumers get their hands on the new SSD technology. The speeds were slow compared to the other SSDs at that time, but for the first time we could use the word affordable in the same sentence as “SSD”.

Moving forward to today, we are testing the second generation of the drives from this lineup. The read and write speeds have improved and we still get the same affordability. Kingston quotes read and write speeds of 200 MB/s and 160 MB/s respectively for the 128 GB model that we are testing today. With the smaller sized models, you get more affordability but the write speeds take a major hit. The 64 GB model offers write speeds of 110 MB/s while the 30GB model offers 50 MB/s. Even though the write speeds are significantly reduced, the read speeds remain largely unaffected. Even the smallest 30GB model offers 180 MB/s for the read speeds offering you a faster than mechanical hard drive experience.

For the 128 GB model, Kingston sent us the notebook upgrade kit. This kit includes Acronis True Image HD hard disk cloning software to enable easy transfer of data from your previous storage setup, a USB 2.0 drive enclosure that enables the use of this SSD as a portable USB hard drive and the USB 2.0 cable required for connecting the enclosure to the USB port.

Here are the specifications quoted from Kingston

• Capacity — 30 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB
• Storage Temperatures — -40° C to 85° C
• Operating temperatures — 0° C to 70° C
• Vibration Operating — 2.17 G Peak (7–800Hz)
• Vibration Non-Operation — 20 G Peak (20–2000Hz)
• Sequential Speed —
  30 GB – up to 180 MB/sec. read, 50 MB/sec write
  64 GB – up to 200MB/sec. read; 110MB/sec. write
  128 GB – up to 200MB/sec. read; 160MB/sec. write
• Power Specs —
  Active: 1.7 – 5.2 W (TYP)
  Sleep: 0.05 – 0.7 W (TYP)
• Life expectancy — 1 million hours mean time before failure, 64 GB/128 GB
  500,000 hours mean time before failure, 30 GB